Accenture is investing in the metaverse. The company announced a strategic investment in the growing hologram company Looking Glass Factory. The precise amount of the investment was not disclosed. This marks deal number 156 of M&A deals tracked by ChannelE2E and MSSP Alert so far in 2023.
Looking Glass has 69 employees listed on LinkedIn, working out of its headquarters in Brooklyn, New York and its offices in Hong Kong. The company has developed an end-to-end holographic platform, with a lineup of displays that can show content in life-like 3D, without requiring the use of headsets or head-tracking.
According to Accenture, there is growing consumer and business interest in the metaverse as a creator economy and tool to enhance day-to-day tasks. The market 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, the company said.
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.
Accenture Invests in Looking Glass: A Metaverse Play
David Treat, senior managing director and global lead of Accenture’s Metaverse Continuum business group, commented on the investment:
“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.”
Shawn Frayne, co-founder and CEO of Looking Glass, said:
“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. 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.”
Tom Lounibos, managing director, Accenture Ventures, added:
“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. 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.”
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.
