Mscape was used to create mediascapes, interactive experiences made up of video, audio, images, and text.

Mscape stored the digital media files in a structure that associates them with positions from a GPS system.

In one trial, visitors to Bristol's harbor could virtually navigate the history of what was once one of Britain's busiest ports.

[3] In 2007, HP made the authoring suite and mobile player software available for download at no cost from the Mscapers community website.

[6] Mscape evolved from research in Augmented reality (which deals with the combination of real world and computer generated data) and from developments in location-based services (services available through a mobile device based on the device’s geographical location).

Three technologies were essential to mediascapes: portable computing, embedded sensors, and context-coded information and services.

Mscape was made practical by the ready availability of consumer GPS navigation devices such as GPS-equipped PDAs and smartphones.

The publicly available version of Mscape took advantage only of a player’s GPS location.,[8][9] However, experimental deployments of mediascapes used other types of sensors, such as short-range radio beacons and heart rate monitors.

Media — images, video, audio, and Flash interactions — was triggered by the logic assigned to a specific space.

Streaming media over a wireless network would also be useful in contexts in which content needs to be updated frequently to reflect rapidly changing information or time-based data.

Their intent was to make Mscape's scripting language simple enough for beginners: "you can pick it up fairly quickly and you can achieve quite advanced things without having to do lots of programming.

Members of the HP Labs team who contributed to the development of Mscape were: Members of the HP Labs team who contributed to the development of the Mscapers community website were: Stenton, S. P.; Hull, R.; Goddi, P. M.; Reid, J. E.; Clayton, B. J.; Melamed, T. J.; Wee, S. (2007).