With Covid-19 still a constant threat, Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov announced Monday that his virtual truth and synthetic intelligence company, Sensorium Corporation, is creating a new virtual real social platform, where users can attend virtual concerts, music festivals, etc.
“Imagine seeing your favorite artists in space, on a level, with absolute freedom to get as close as you like,” Prokhorov said in an email to Forbes.”Virtual truth is a new art form.”
The platform, called Sensorium Galaxy, is expected to launch in the first part of 2021, but there are still many unknowns.The company claims to have attracted $100 million in investments from entertainment companies, but would reveal the names of investors.Although it claims to have “great artists on board”, the company has revealed which musicians or bands have registered.
Virtual truth is still incipient and, as such, an unproven company.But Prokhorov, the only billionaire who bets on virtual truth.Facebook of Mark Zuckerberg, who spent $2 billion in 2014 to buy the company’s real virtual apparatus Oculus, introduced Facebook Horizon, an open virtual truth platform.to a small organization of beta users, prior to this year.
“Today, the globalization of other people turns out to be limited across a small screen in front of them,” Prokhorov said in his email.”The emergence of technologies that combine synthetic intelligence and virtual truth represents an opportunity to correct the existing scenario through expanding virtual communications through a new generation of virtual environments for social connections.A corporation executive said Monday that one of his goals was to achieve “virtual immortality.”
The concert industry has been in 2020, with exhibitions and festivals canceled around the world in an effort to curb the spread of Covid-19, although efforts were made to host live exhibitions at a social distance, from hitch-to-board concerts in Chicago to social distance.exhibitions in the north of England, where participants separated into 500 elevated steel platforms, most live exhibits were postponed.According to the pollstar industry publication, the live industry could lose up to $8.9 billion in profits this year if the existing scenario persists.
The pandemic also had an effect on the Galaxy sensorium timeline, with “minor developmental delays,” said Matias Lapushin, the company’s spokesman.”We have a massive [motion capture study] where we practically recreate artists in virtual reality, however, the crisis has obviously prevented us from doing so in recent months. However, all our alliances are still in place and wonderful artists are on board. Lapushin adds that the platform, where users can also chat and play, among other features, is available through a virtual reality viewer and a non-public computer.
Sensorium, founded through Prokhorov in 2018, is registered in the Cayman Islands, with offices in Moscow, Zurich and Los Angeles, and holds a 27% stake in Redpill VR, a Generation company based in Los Angeles that also uses virtual truth for entertainment events.The company uses a 3-d authoring tool created through Epic Games, the creator of the popular Fortnite video game, for its virtual platform.Other partners come with the charity Sergei Polunin, a Ukrainian ballet dancer who, in 2019, invited to dance at the Paris Opera Ballet withdrew due to homophobic commentary he made on social media.
Prokhorov is an unlikely investor in a truly virtual entertainment company.His fortune dates back to the messy era of Russian privatization in the early 1990s, when he founded Onexim Bank with fellow billionaire oligarch Vladimir Potanin.At the time, the bank processed loans to the government and failing state-owned enterprises and eventually took over Norilsk Nickel, a metal giant that the two men sold in 2008 to another Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska.That year, Prokhorov was on Forbes’ list of global billionaires for an estimated $19.5 Forbes lately worth its net worth at $11.4 billion.
But it also differs from other oligarchs. Prokhorov bought the Nets, an NBA team, in 2010 for $ 200 million and worked with billionaire media mogul Jay-Z to move the team from New Jersey to Brooklyn. Prokhorov then sold the team and rights to the arena in 2019 for an estimated $ 3.3 billion to Alibaba’s billionaire co-founder Joe Tsai.
He is known for frequenting the Spanish island of Ibiza, known for his nightclubs, perhaps why one of the first content partners of Sensorium Galaxy is Yann Pissenem, a DJ who owns two nightclubs on the island.
Prokhorov opposed Vladimir Putin as President of Russia in 2012, winning 8% of the vote and is the only oligarch to have given the impression on the Daily Show with Stephen Colbert.
Although Prokhorov told Forbes in 2013 that he planned to run for president again, he seems to have put his political ambitions on him.
He is not an active user of real virtual products, he said in his email, but explained that he was attracted to his potential.”Virtual worlds are a component of the evolution of human communication,” Prokhorov said.”It’s an herbal process, and others people shouldn’t be afraid of it…In a virtual galaxy, the only restriction is your imagination.”
I’m an editor at Forbes Magazine.