Bob Cooney sits down with two people who have been building immersive entertainment since its earliest days: Lance Loesberg of BigLook360, who ran Virtuality’s North American business in the 1990s before pioneering 360° video production, and Jeremy Dalton, founder of XRHQ and former head of PwC’s immersive technologies team. Together they dig into the new wave of immersive cinema — Cosm, The Sphere, ABBA Voyage — and the business case for putting free-roam VR inside the world’s underused movie theaters.
Key Highlights
- 00:00 – 04:49 | Introductions & Origin Stories
- Lance recounts running Virtuality’s North American offices in the early 90s, selling VR pods while Bob ran laser tag arcades — and the General Motors 360° VR test drive that toured the country in tractor trailers and ran for five years.
- Jeremy traces his path from PwC auditor to building the firm’s first dedicated immersive team, deploying tens of thousands of headsets across 50+ countries.
- 04:49 – 08:47 | Why Immersive Formats Matter Now
- Gaming’s post-pandemic shakeout, shifting audience tastes, and the rise of large premium formats over traditional cinema.
- 08:47 – 17:30 | Cosm and The Matrix
- Lance describes Cosm as “a planetarium on steroids” — LED panel domes, secretive specs, and how The Matrix was staged as a screen-within-effects rather than full reformatting.
- Jeremy on the custom content surrounding key scenes — sparks on the Nebuchadnezzar, comfortable vertigo on the rooftop.
- Tiered pricing ($35–$65), themed F&B, and the open question of whether a reported ~$80M venue pencils on a handful of locations.
- 17:30 – 20:31 | ABBA Voyage
- $175M in production costs, years to breakeven — and why a fully virtual concert still gets audiences dancing.
- Bob on the moment he realized the lighting rigs themselves were part of the projection.
- 20:31 – 23:05 | The Sphere
- Jeremy calls it “the most immersive experience I’ve had outside of a headset.”
- Wizard of Oz: AI-expanded scenes, the controversy, and why Warner Bros. IP keeps showing up in immersive venues.
- 23:05 – 31:57 | The Cinema Problem
- Roughly 40% of opening-weekend box office for tentpole films comes from about 2% of screens — the IMAX ones — while thousands of auditoriums sit underused.
- The broken distribution window between studios and cinema owners, and the IMAX playbook (documentaries → re-releases → day-and-date) as a template for dome content.
- 31:57 – 34:27 | Shooting for VR Is Its Own Craft
- Doug Liman calling his VR short Asteroid the hardest thing he’s ever shot; why close-proximity 360° capture and dome projection demand different production techniques.
- 34:27 – 38:20 | The Free-Roam VR Opportunity
- Horizons of Khufu: ~$30M in ticket sales, 100 people at a time, on less than $100K of deployable hardware.
- Bob’s case for dropping free-roam VR into 2,500 sq ft of a converted theater auditorium — a fraction of the cost of a small-format IMAX install.
- 38:20 – 43:50 | Scalability and Adoption
- Standalone headsets, Gen Alpha growing up with VR, and the niche-vs-mainstream debate — Jeremy argues the medium must become as familiar as glasses before mainstream adoption arrives.
- 43:50 – 47:18 | The Classic-Movie Question
- Butch Cassidy, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Alien, Fantastic Voyage, and Westworld as free-roam VR experiences.
- 47:18 – end | Is Location-Based VR Making Money?
- Bob’s honest read: Sandbox VR corporate stores at ~$1.5M revenue and ~40% EBITDA, Zero Latency at 165 locations across six continents, Eclipso’s cultural tourism model working in Europe — while VR arcades stay stuck under a dollar a minute.
🎧Notable Quotes
“A planetarium on steroids.”
— Lance Loesberg on Cosm (09:32)
“It’s the most immersive experience I’ve had outside of a headset.”
— Jeremy Dalton on The Sphere (20:44)
“Content is still king. If it was great 50 years ago, why wouldn’t it be great today?”
— Lance Loesberg (22:23)
“The high-end VR stuff that can support a $50 ticket price for a 25- or 30-minute experience seems to make money.”
— Bob Cooney (49:45)
