Further concession deals signed by virtual reality group
Salford-based virtual reality specialist Immotion Group has signed a number of concession agreements, including its first zoo.
This follows the initial success of its ‘Blue Ocean’ VR cinematic pod installations.
The new locations are Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, and Santa Barbara Zoo.
Mote, established in 1955, is one of the oldest aquariums in the USA, with a staff of more than 200 people on a 10.5-acre estate, serving some 344,000 annual visitors.
Santa Barbara Zoo is the company’s first deployment in a zoo, a 30-acre site housing more than 500 animals with around 500,000 visitors per annum.
These new additions join several other aquariums including: OdySea in Scottsdale, Arizona, which recently featured on FoxNews, Norwalk in Connecticut, and Merlin Entertainments’ SeaLife centres in Sydney, and Melbourne, both of which opened their VR offering to the public last week, and SeaLife in Oberhausen, Germany, which opened a few weeks ago.
Rod Findley, Immotion group commercial director, said: “We continue to hone our aquatic offering.
“Our latest experience, ‘Swimming with Sharks’ filmed in the Bahamas, will be released shortly, plus we have two more subsea CGI experiences being loaded on to our cinematic pods this month.
“Initial customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with very encouraging early trading across all the aquatic centres.”
He added: “As we develop our business model we will focus more of our efforts on perfecting our VR cinema pods for high footfall destination locations, such as aquatic centres and zoos. Our experiential content is quickly becoming renowned for its immersive quality and realism.
“Our concession model offers a compelling and flexible opportunity for high traffic ‘edutainment’ destinations, such as aquariums, zoos and science centres.”
He said: “We believe this is a global opportunity and will be putting considerable focus into growing the installed base and developing our offering over the coming months.”
