Quick take:
- Accenture has announced a strategic investment in Looking Glass Factory.
- The professional services company wants to make it easier for brands to offer immersive experiences to customers.
- The company recently invested in Forma Vision to bring immersive experiences to boardrooms.
Accenture has announced a strategic investment in Looking Glass Factory. The undisclosed figure is part of the professional services company’s goal of enabling its portfolio of clients to join the metaverse.
Looking Glass Factory is a New York-based hologram company that enables businesses to offer immersive experiences to customers buying products online. Accenture wants to help its portfolio of online business clients to bring immersive experiences to e-commerce stores.
This announcement comes hot on the heels of the company’s recent investment in Forma Vision, another hologram company that focuses on providing photo-real immersive experiences to corporations.
Looking Glass has developed a holographic platform that showcases content in life-like 3D. Unlike several platforms that require users to wear a 3D headset to interact with content immersively, Looking Glass can offer the same experience without VR/AR headsets.
This makes its technology perfect for adoption by e-commerce businesses looking to offer 3D experiences to customers.
Looking Glass’ display technology allows brands, designers, and consumers to showcase 3D content that is typically viewed in 2D. The company believes that the rapid shift towards 3D experiences could have a significant impact on the future of communications and retail.
Eventually, the consumption of 3D media could become a norm at home, further boosting adoption and use cases.
This forecast aligns with Accenture’s own prediction that the metaverse could be a $1 trillion industry by 2025. In a report by McKinsey, the immersive 3D industry could be worth $5 trillion by 2030.
Commenting on his company’s investment in Looking Glass, David Treat, senior managing director and global lead of Accenture’s Metaverse Continuum business group said: “Looking Glass’ 3D technology can be deployed in physical environments along with paired metaverse experiences to create deeper, more immersive interactions between brands and their customers.”
“We believe this technology has the potential to play a valuable role in metaverse content creation and across enterprise applications that bridge the physical and digital worlds, including retail marketing and holographic communications,” added Treat.
This investment will help Accenture leverage Looking Glass’ technology to accelerate its metaverse campaign. Last March, the company launched the “Metaverse Continuum Group”, a unit tasked with bringing metaverse experiences to the corporate world.
The group combines digital commerce, extended reality, blockchain, digital twins, artificial intelligence and computer vision to help clients launch and accelerate their metaverse campaigns.
Shawn Frayne, co-founder and CEO of Looking Glass commented: “We believe this shift will be bigger than that from radio to TV, or the shift from black and white to colour. The hologram era has truly begun and joining Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight initiative will help us drive increased enterprise adoption of the powerful brand experiences and connections that Looking Glass will deliver.”
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