It will start out, at least at first, like any other trip to the movies. You’ll pay for your ticket, grab some popcorn and find your seat. At some point, however, there will be movement on the side walls of the theatre as the extra screens come into view and you’ll find yourself in an immersive, 180-degree panoramic experience courtesy of Barco Escape.
The company, which is based in Sacramento, Calif., opened the first of three planned Canadian installations of its technology at a Cineplex Entertainment location in Toronto, where audiences were given their first glimpse of its impact during screenings of Star Trek: Beyond. Director Justin Lin and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot company added 20 more minutes of footage to the movie just to help show off the Barco Escape screens.
Ted Schilowitz, Barco Escape’s chief creative officer, is helping promote the technology while also serving as futurist at 20th Century Fox, which provided some of the first titles to be shown on Barco Escape such as the Maze Runner series. He said being involved with the studio and Barco had given him a unique role as an executive to think deeply about what would provide more value to cinema-goers while also helping directly with a company that is doing hands-on work in the same area.
“The one thing that is probably lagged behind in the technological revolution is the cinema,” he said. “Even though we went from film to digital, the fundamental experience of going to the movie has stayed the same for a very long time. Then when you go to a theme park environment and see people creating different ways to entertain, you start to see how you can take some of that logic and build something that will go to scale.”
Barco Escape is already installed in more than 30 theatres around the world including Latin America, the Middle East and China. The plan is to raise that number to 100 by the end of the year, and a big part of the success may not only be tied to ticket sales, but how brands could enhance the way they position themselves in front of movie fans.
“In the traditional pre-show entertainment where audiences have a single screen, they’re not particularly compelled to watch that,” he argued. “We often get referred to as the brick and mortar virtual reality because it’s a 180-degree experience. It dovetails into all those new technologies, but the beauty is it’s in a traditional theatre, because then it’s also a social experience.”
Barco Escape has already done tests with brands such as M&Ms using creative across the larger screen real estate during the recent upfronts in the U.S., Schilowitz said. Other categories that could benefit from the panoramic perspective might be automotive, he added, where people could see more of how a vehicle moves from one side of their view to the other.
Barco Escape is coming to movies at a time when Cineplex is also experimenting with 4D entertainment, where smells, sounds and motion are integrated into watching a movie. Schilowitz said those things could go together, but the company was focused on the expanded visuals first.
While 3D movies took a lot of promotion and education to help audiences understand what it would mean for them, Barco is taking an equally comprehensive approach to building up awareness, Schilowitz said. This will include Barco standup displays near ticket desks, at the bar and concession areas. In the meantime, he suggested marketers shouldn’t wait for the technology to get mainstream buzz.
“If brands and companies are looking for ways to engage their audiences and connect their audience, you want to start figuring out what that means now and how to craft messages for those technologies, rather than when it’s at scale,” he said.
