A Kelowna tech company that specializes in spherical immersive video has been been bought by a leading Hollywood special effects company for $100 million.
Immersive Media, which has created specialized fully immersive video for the likes of Disney, ABC, American Express, Converse, Turner Broadcasting and Mountain Dew and Mercedes Benz, has been acquired by Hollywood special effects giant Digital Domain Holdings.
It’s the biggest tech sale in the Okanagan since Disney paid $350 million for Club Penguin in 2007.
The sale was announced by Tech Vibes on its blog Friday.
Immersive Media, founded in 1994, creates 360-degree video with specially made spherical cameras. It has worked on many projects including singer Taylor Swift’s Unstaged: Taylor Swift Experience for which it won an Emmy Award for original interactive program last year. It also covered the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver for U.S. broadcaster NBC and in 2011 partenerd with Livestream to produce the world’s first 360-degree stream of a Black Eyed Peas concert from Central Park in New York City.
It’s technology started the Google Streetview program.
Digital Domain Holdings, which owns Hollywood special effects giant Digital Domain, has produced special effect for a long list of big-budget Hollywood movies including Canadian director Jame’s Cameron's Titantic, as well as the Iron Man 3, the Transformers trilogy, Maleficent, the X-Men series and Furious 7.
Cameron, known for making movies that employ cutting edge technology, such as Avatar, was a co-founder of Digital Domain.