Immotion, the virtual reality entertainment specialist, will install VR cinematic pods in two major attractions in the US – The Mote Aquarium and Santa Barbara Zoo.
Mote in Sarasota, Florida is one of the oldest aquariums in the US and welcomes 344,000 annual visitors. Santa Barbara has approximately 500,000 guests annually and is Immotion’s first deployment in a zoo.
The new additions join several other aquariums, including OdySea in Scottsdale, Arizona, The Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Connecticut, and Merlin Entertainments’ SeaLife centres in Oberhausen, Germany, Sydney and Melbourne, both of which opened their VR offering to the public last week.
Swim with sharks in The Bahamas
Rod Findley, 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.
“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 become 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. 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.”
Immotion recently joined forces with iP2Entertainment, after signing a $500,000 VR and immersive content creation contract.
The company also launched a world-first swimming with whales experience, and announced the rollout of its VR simulators to Legoland Discovery Centres worldwide.
