Accenture has made a strategic investment through Accenture Ventures in Looking Glass Factory, a Brooklyn, New York hologram company. Looking Glass has developed an end-to-end holographic platform, with a lineup of displays that can show content in 3D, without requiring the use of headsets or head-tracking.
Growing consumer and business interest in the metaverse as a creator economy and tool to enhance day-to-day tasks is expected to fuel a $1 trillion revenue opportunity by the end of 2025, according to Accenture findings released in January 2023. Technology like Looking Glass offers the opportunity to connect 3D digital experiences in the metaverse to the physical world.
Looking Glass has paired its display technology with a software suite that allows brands, designers, and consumers to showcase 3D content that is typically viewed in 2D. The fast-moving shift from 2D to 3D media could have a significant impact on the future of retail, communication, and eventually, the home, where the consumption of 3D media could become the norm. In June 2022, Looking Glass introduced the world’s largest holographic display, the Looking Glass 65″, which is already being used in Accenture Labs in San Francisco.
Further, the Looking Glass Blocks sharing platform enables the same content to be shared seamlessly through any internet browser and across a variety of environments: mobile, social and even the metaverse. This marks the first-ever platform for hosting and sharing 3D holograms on the internet, allowing brands to provide their fans with an immersive consumer experience anywhere, on any device.
“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,” said David Treat, senior managing director and global lead of Accenture’s Metaverse Continuum business group. “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.”
In March 2022, Accenture formed the Accenture Metaverse Continuum business group, which combines metaverse-skilled professionals and deep capabilities in customer experience, digital commerce, extended reality, blockchain, digital twins, artificial intelligence and computer vision to help clients design, execute and accelerate their metaverse journeys.
“With our patented software and hardware platform that includes our Looking Glass Portrait display and the larger format Looking Glass 32″ and 65″, Looking Glass holograms are poised to drive the seismic shift from 2D to 3D,” said Shawn Frayne, co-founder and CEO of Looking Glass. “We believe this shift will be bigger than that from radio to TV, or the shift from black and white to color. 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.”
Looking Glass is the latest company to join Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program focused on investing in companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. In addition to funding, Project Spotlight connects emerging technology startups with the Global 2000 to fill strategic innovation gaps and offers extensive access to Accenture’s domain expertise and enterprise clients, helping startups harness human creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology.
“As more companies establish and expand their metaverse presence, they’re looking for ways to bring immersive metaverse experiences to their customers in the physical world, and we believe Looking Glass’ holographic platform can enable them do that,” said Tom Lounibos, managing director, Accenture Ventures. “We look forward to introducing our clients and ecosystem partners to the Looking Glass holographic software and hardware platform and working together to create new content, along with dynamic, customized 3D user experiences and interactions.”
