Virtual Mechelen

Mechelen is the first city in the Benelux to offer a virtual visit through the entire city.

On www.virtueelmechelen.be you can see the city from a helicopter perspective and teleport to specific locations. You can also view the most important sights, museums and hotels in 360°. Not only can you get a virtual view of the entire city, it also makes it much more accessible to people with limitatinos. With this virtual visit, the city wants to attract more visitors.

Virtual walking through the city and visiting tourist highlights can be done via one online portal. If you have a Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Rift as a surfer, you can also experience the VR experience at home. In the future, more locations will be added.

604 gigabytes of footage and 38 locations

Some churches and buildings that are currently undergoing restoration, such as the future tourist desk in the Schepenhuis, the Hof van Busleyden Museum and some city scapes and shopping streets are still in the queue. Currently, 604 gigabytes of visual material have already been recorded and you can visit 38 locations virtually.

Thanks to Virtual Mechelen you can also visit locations that were previously less accessible to the public. Just think of the Margaret Palace of Austria, the town hall or the mural in the St. John’s Church, which can only be visited with a guide. In order to approach reality as closely as possible, very high resolutions were used. The virtual visualization of the mural of St. John’s Church, for example, is a 360 image with 1500 megapixels or 125 times the image quality of an iPhone 7.

Climb the tower without stairs

The website serves not only as an invitation to visit, but also to offer less mobile people the opportunity to enjoy less accessible attractions. For example, you can borrow the Oculus Rift glasses at the tower desk of the Sint-Rombouts Tower to visit the tower in virtual reality without having to climb the stairs.

Sharing experiences and promoting Mechelen

You can also share images via www.virtueelmechelen.be. If you are impressed by a city scape, a historic building or charmed by one of the hotels, you can take a snapshot via the ‘postcard’ function. You can download, e-mail or share this postcard on social media.