Glo Inc. announced today that they’ve secured $3M in seed funding from Alibaba, CRCM Ventures, Presence Capital, Mindworks, and unnamed angel investors. The funding will be used to accelerate development of its proprietary VR system, Glostation, which is also now being licensed by IMAX for its VR entertainment centers.
The VR industry has multiple verticals. On the one hand you’ve got the consumer technology angle with devices such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PSVR that feature lots of games and entertainment apps. There’s also the enterprise angle for educational uses, hospitals, and other businesses. Then going beyond all of that are the location-based entertainment centers, VR arcades, and other venue-based implementations of the technology.
Glo Inc. is a company with their hands in a few different pots. For example, we reviewed one of their debut VR games last year, Unearthed Inc., but now this is VR on a much larger scale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=pa6kXBw9ve8
The first IMAX VR experience to use the Glostation technology will be the zombie-themed game Deadwood Mansion, which is slated to hit the Los Angeles IMAX Center first, followed by New York and other locations afterwards.
“GloStation is a highly interactive, social and thrilling virtual reality experience – making it a perfect fit for IMAX’s location-based VR centres,” said Rob Lister, Chief Business Development Officer at IMAX Corp. in a prepared statement “Customer feedback on the Deadwood Mansion VR experience at our centre in Los Angeles has been fantastic, and we look forward to working with Glo Inc. to bring GloStation to other IMAX VR Centres around the world.”
Glostation-powered VR arcades will join the ranks of other location-based venues, such as The Void, as premiere destinations for “wharehouse-scale” VR gaming.
“We opened our showroom in Hong Kong late June, and for the next 100 days, we were 100% sold out each single day,” said Steve Zhao, CEO of Glo Inc. in a prepared statement. “Weekend tickets are now booking months in advance into 2018. Now, with this new investment, we will be able to scale our proprietary free-roaming VR system GloStation to cities globally. We’re delighted to be working with IMAX to introduce our experience to their world-class VR centres.”
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