Pixel Streaming — Open City

A client needed an interactive city experience that anyone could access from a browser — walk through streets, explore buildings, click on elements to trigger interactions — without downloading an app or owning a high-end GPU. The city model had to be detailed enough to feel like a real place, with navigable interiors, interactive hotspots, and real-time response to user input.

Feative Studios built the open-world city in Unreal Engine 5 and delivered it through Pixel Streaming. The full scene renders on a cloud GPU and streams to the browser over WebRTC. Users navigate with keyboard and mouse or touch, explore freely, and interact with designated elements — all in real time with no install required.

The city needed to feel explorable, not like a pre-rendered walkthrough. Users had to move freely through streets, enter buildings, and trigger interactions with specific objects — the kind of spatial interactivity that normally requires a native application or a powerful local GPU.

WebGL and browser-based 3D can't match the visual fidelity of a full Unreal scene, especially at city scale. A downloadable app solves the rendering problem but introduces friction: installation, hardware requirements, platform restrictions. The client wanted zero friction — a link that works on any device.

The city model itself was large: multiple blocks, building interiors, interactive objects scattered throughout. Keeping the experience responsive under Pixel Streaming's latency constraints while maintaining visual quality required careful scene optimization and streaming configuration.

Feative Studios set up a cloud-rendered Pixel Streaming pipeline. The UE5 city scene runs headless on a GPU instance — off-screen rendering, hardware H.264 encoding, WebRTC transport to the browser. A Node.js signaling server handles session negotiation; a TURN server ensures connectivity behind firewalls.

The city uses baked lighting for predictable GPU cost under streaming, with Nanite handling the dense building geometry. Interactive hotspots use UE5's blueprint trigger system — clicking an object fires an event in the engine (open a door, play an animation, display information). The browser-side UI overlays navigation controls and interaction prompts on top of the video stream.

For navigation, the system supports both free-roam and guided paths. Users can wander streets freely or follow curated routes through key locations. Adaptive bitrate encoding maintains quality during network fluctuations, and touch input maps to camera control for mobile users.

The finished experience loads in seconds on any modern browser. Users walk through the city, explore building interiors, click on objects to trigger interactions, and share the link with anyone — no app store, no hardware check, no setup. The client uses it for presentations, remote walkthroughs, and stakeholder demos where spatial understanding matters more than a slide deck.

Because the scene runs server-side, city updates propagate instantly — add a building, change a facade, place a new interactive element — and every user sees it on next load. The client's design team iterates in the Unreal editor while the experience stays live for users simultaneously.