Bruce Peterson is founder and CEO of Grande Experiences, a leading global arts and culture immersive experience company that recently reached a significant milestone with the opening of its 250th display. The company began in 2006 and has since reached more than 23 million visitors across the globe with its unique immersive experiences. These include Van Gogh Alive, Da Vinci Alive, Monet & Friends Alive, Dali Alive, Street Art Alive and Italian Renaissance Alive, as well as Planet Shark. They have been shown in over 180 cities and translated into 33 languages.
Over the last 17 years, Grande Experiences has established itself as one of the world’s most successful and innovative immersive experience companies. Peterson, who worked as a teacher before founding Grande Experiences, told blooloop: “As an ex-teacher, I knew that if we wanted to educate, we had to engage. And to engage, you must entertain. In view of this, we wanted to develop a type of multimedia-based exhibition that no one had ever created before.”
“It took us two years to develop the technology and tourability, and we put that first experience on at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore in 2011. So, we really pioneered this whole movement of touring immersive experiences. Then, in 2017/2018, we introduced multi-sensory elements. We looked at how your kinaesthetic sense of space, audio, visual, taste, touch, smell and all those things synchronised together.”
Grande Experiences has also built a 3000-square-metre multisensory digital art gallery, THE LUME Melbourne, to serve as a permanent flagship venue. This opened in November 2021. It is the world’s largest digital art gallery, with 150 HD projectors shooting at four storeys high and a 99-channel spatial audio system.