It has been announced by Immotion Group, that following the success of the Blue Ocean Series, VR cinematic pods will be installed into two major attractions in the US. The new locations are Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida and Santa Barbara Zoo. Mote is one of the oldest aquariums in the US and welcomes 344,000 annual visitors.
Santa Barbara houses over 500 animals with circa 500,000 guests per annum and is Immotion’s first deployment in a zoo.
These new additions join several other aquariums including: OdySea in Scottsdale, Arizona, which recently featured on FoxNews, The Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Connecticut, and Merlin Entertainments SeaLife centers 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, 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 centers.
“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 centers. 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.”
