In 2021 the Sensorium Hall concert complex for 8,000 people will open in Moscow City. Mikhail Prokhorov’s company owns the project. It will be possible to attend a concert in the Sensorium Hall remotely, thanks to virtual reality technologies
The multifunctional concert complex Sensorium Hall will receive its first guests in 2021, told Forbes Vladimir Kedrinsky, General Director of the Fan Generation company implementing the project. The company is owned by Cyprus-based Intergeo Holdings Limited, which, in turn, is controlled by Onexim Holdings Limited, affiliated with Mikhail Prokhorov #11 .
Tropics in the City
Prokhorov decided to build the concert hall almost 10 years ago. The capital’s authorities had no money to build the central core of Moscow City, and they called on a private investor to help. The venue was going to open in 2016, but the deadlines were repeatedly postponed. It took two and a half years to put the land plot into circulation, says Kedrinsky. A lot of time was spent on the “ideological” debates between the “functionalists” and architects, says another project participant.
In the end we settled on the concept of “Tropics in the megapolis”, says Kedrinsky. According to him, Sensorium Hall will bring to Moscow “the main deficit – eternal summer”. The core of the 11-story building in the form of a giant dial will be a “beach club”, says Kedrinsky: “The space of a tropical garden with a water lagoon located under a glass dome”.
According to the plan, the venue will seat up to 8,000 people and can transform into a concert hall, event hall or exhibition space – 20 configurations in all. The cost of the project is more than $200 million.
In summer, the dome of the hall will be open for open-air parties. According to Kedrinsky, the Ushuaia Club from Ibiza will host them. “Whoever opens a concert hall in “Moscow-City” will make good money,” believes Andreas Lobzhanidze, promoter and founder of the club “Rai”. Working day of the inhabitants of the business center ends around the same time as the beginning of concert programs. This will ensure the occupancy of the hall. But Lobzhanidze doubts the relevance of the night club: their popularity among Muscovites is falling, and they start working much later than the end of the working day. By this time office workers will have dispersed.
The idea is utopian, admits one of the project participants: “Anything can be built in Moscow, even the Taj Mahal mausoleum or the Eiffel Tower. In any case, in a year it will be old news. Moscow is a very spoiled city in that sense. White-collar workers get fat very quickly. However, to all appearances, Prokhorov has thought of something to feed the capital’s discerning public.
Virtual Club
In the summer of 2019, at the largest gaming exhibition E3 in Los Angeles, Sensorium Corporation, together with the startup Redpill, presented a prototype of a social VR platform. Visitors wearing VR glasses were transported to a virtual dance club where a real DJ played. The project has already received $70 million in funding.
“We’re creating a virtual universe that offers users direct access to major concerts and club events from around the world,” Sensorium Corporation CEO Ingvar Goldman explained in an interview with American Forbes. Users will enter one of the many virtual rooms, with a separate concert or club area inside. “Once inside, users will be able to interact with avatars and artists, watch and participate in the event, and interact with other users,” Goldman explained. The virtual events will be streamed live from world-famous venues and clubs, he said. Thanks to the event library, it will be possible to visit events from the past.
According to SPARK-Interfax, Fan Generation owned the Sensorium trademark until October 2019. It is now owned by Sensorium Corporation of the Cayman Islands. Kedrinsky, on the other hand, runs Sensorium Corporation Moscow, which describes itself on a job search site as one of the companies of the Onexim Group (Prokhorov’s holding company) and a startup “at the intersection of the VR, music and gaming industries.” The company also indicates that it is the “initiator of a new global project” aimed at the U.S. and European audiences.
“Right now I’m working on several ideas related to social VR technology,” Prokhorov told Forbes through a representative. – Stay tuned!” The billionaire did not disclose his stake in the Sensorium Corporation project. VR technologies allow to scale the audience’s access to the artists’ work to tens and hundreds of millions of people, Kedrinsky said. These are “unthinkable parameters for classic intertechnology”, the top manager notes. Together with his team he is developing a stage show based on virtual and augmented reality technologies: “Sensorium Hall is preparing something very special for the Moscow audience.