location-based-entertainment
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Holovis Builds the Part of the Magic You Are Not Supposed to Notice
The British company turns cameras, code, screens, sound and scenery into attractions for the names above the gate. Its real product is the seam between spectacle and reliable operation.
Cineplex Built a Business Around the One Thing Netflix Cannot Ship: A Night Out
Canada's biggest exhibitor stopped treating the movie ticket as the whole product. Its harder-to-copy advantage is the evening wrapped around it - popcorn, premium screens, loyalty points, ads, games, dinner and the stubborn human urge to go somewhere together.
Dave & Buster’s Is Really a Game Company With a Kitchen Attached
The burgers bring people to a table. The flashing midway, reloadable Power Cards and promise of one more game keep the economics moving. Inside a national eatertainment chain, play is the main course.
The Company Behind 41,100 Machines - and Almost None of Its Own Casinos
J&J Gaming built a national route business by making gambling local, regulated and operationally boring. Its real product is not the flashing cabinet - it is everything required to keep 41,100 machines earning inside someone else’s business.
Andretti Indoor Karting & Games
The racing surname is real, the karts hit real speed, and the business behind them is quietly turning empty afternoons into corporate team-building budgets - one 14-venue location at a time.
Light Field Lab, Inc.
Light Field Lab is a San Jose deep-tech company building SolidLight, a holographic display platform that projects three-dimensional objects into open space with no glasses, headsets, or eyewear required. Founded in 2017 by three veterans of the light-field camera company Lytro, it assembles self-emissive, bezel-less panels into modular video walls dense enough - roughly 10 billion pixels per square meter - to form images the eye reads as physically real. Backed by $85M including a $50M Series B with Bill Gates' Gates Frontier, Corning, LG, NCSOFT, and Samsung, and named to TIME's Best Inventions of 2022, the company is now productizing SolidLight for enterprise, entertainment, and public-display markets.