Launching a new home for VR & AR in London’s Olympic Park
We are ridiculously excited to announce that Glimpse has teamed up with Plexal to open a VR/AR studio and workspace in the London Olympic Park! You can jump straight to details on the Studio & Workspace or read the story of how we got here.
Why bother?
As we (Michael & Dan) set out to create Glimpse, we quickly hit an unexpected problem: Where can you build a VR company in London? Our ideal place to work would have:
- Access to kit. VR equipment is expensive and rapidly changing. We envisaged a space where we can share access to kit & pool resources.
- Space. We’ve already had to plaster holes in our living room walls. We wanted a dedicated, decent sized floorspace to roam around in our VR creations. We also wanted all the basics: Good location, meeting rooms, decent coffee etc.
- Community. We wanted to work side-by-side with other VR entrepreneurs in a space where we can share ideas, skills and spur each other on.
- Finance & Opportunities. Could we find a place which attracts the attention of established organisations and investors looking to give us their cash and/or kit?
TechHub, WeWork and numerous other co-working spaces in London could provide us with the desk space, but if we wanted the floorspace to setup VR equipment our only option would be to hire a private office. Not only was this too expensive for us, but it wouldn’t give us access to a wider VR community. It’s so much easier to start a company now because of flexible and affordable access to resources (office space, cloud computing, even talent), VR/AR companies just have slightly different requirements when it comes to these resources.
Turns out we’re not the only ones that think this. So, if it doesn’t exist, let’s build it! With a new mission we turned our gaze to the Olympic Park…
The Olympic Park & Plexal
The London 2012 Olympic Park is a seriously cool place, you should explore it if you haven’t been lately. It’s very far from the abandoned parks of previous games. It’s a hive of activity with new homes, schools and offices going up everywhere. Incredible organisations such as Loughborough Uni, UCL, V&A, Sadler's Wells, TFL, Cancer Research UK, British Council, and BT Sport are all moving here. The old venues are now open and active, including the old press & media buildings, now called Here East.
Part of the transformation at Here East involves creating a new technology hub, an effort being led by Claire Cockerton and her team at Plexal. We got chatting to Claire about the work they are doing and quickly released Plexal could be this place to build a VR startup that we wanted.
Plexal is HUMONGOUS. It’s a tech-focussed coworking space which is so large, they’ve fashioned the layout into a mini city, with a high-street running down the middle and a variety of offices, co-working areas and breakout spaces to chill and co-inhabit during the day. In their own words:
We are located at Here East within 68,000 sq ft of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Designed as a mini city using principles of modern urban planning & technology clusters, Plexal offers technology startups & scaleups a range of flexible working areas from open studio membership to tailor-made private offices & feature spaces including a high street, leisure park & main square.
To cut a long story short, Plexal have 100% bought into our vision for a VR workspace in London. They’ve set aside a load of space in their mini-city that is now entirely about building a VR/AR studio and workspace.
VR is hugely exciting for content creators and innovators across so many industries and we’re only just starting to scratch the surface of what’s possible. Plexal is excited to be partnering with Glimpse Studio, which is on the cutting edge of the technology, and we share its aim of helping London become one of the destinations in the world for VR and AR. — Andrew Cunningham, COO, Plexal
It’s early days but we’re now we’re set to go about creating London’s first alive and kicking VR studio/workspace!
Join Us!
The space is open… but think of this as our public beta. Our priority is to start filling the desks with the most exciting VR/AR entrepreneurs and grow the community that surrounds the space. Hopefully this is where you come in!
VR/AR Workspace
We’ve got 15 fixed desks in a private office which are available to anyone working on AR, VR or mixed reality projects. Even if you’re just starting to tinker and want access to a workspace where you can explore your ideas then this is the space for you!
Oh and you get access to all the regular benefits of a Plexal fixed desk membership. These are priced at £350pm.
VR/AR Studio
Our Studio is BIG! It is directly accessible from the workspace area and will be the breakout space where we can play test (& break) our VR experiences. At the moment it contains two HTC Vive setups (Oculus coming soon!), but we envisage this space developing into a fully fledged mixed reality studio over time.
Community & Events
Building out the community is key to what we’re doing and so our space is open to anyone that wants to run VR/AR events or demo’s. We’ve got the Studio but also a much larger event’s space within Plexal that can be used. We’ll be putting together our own programme of events and inviting other groups to host theirs as well, but if you’ve got any ideas then definitely reach out!
If you or anyone you know is interested in joining us at Plexal, or you have any other questions about Glimpse then get in touch!
