Illuminarium Experiences plans to open at Navy Pier, spacewalks and safaris for ALL!

Illuminarium Experiences, a breakthrough global experiential entertainment company created by leaders in cinematic immersion, theatrical design, and venue operations, announced today, August 25, plans to open an Illuminarium at Chicago’s Navy Pier with construction beginning in early to mid-2022.

The 32,000 square-foot entertainment experience, expected to cost $30 million, will be situated inside the former Crystal Gardens venue, which will be transformed into the fourth Illuminarium location in the U.S., joining Atlanta, Miami and Las Vegas. The initial design process has begun, under the direction of the architecture firms Rockwell Group and Perkins & Will.

What museums are to art, cinemas to movies, and concert halls to music, Illuminarium is to experiential entertainment. Through the cutting-edge capabilities of innovative technologies, Illuminarium’s immersive venues will transport millions of visitors to places that they previously could only dream of experiencing. The inaugural spectacle will be WILD: A Safari Experience followed by Spacewalk, a journey through the Solar System. By enabling audiences to see, hear, feel, smell and even personally affect an experience, Illuminarium will place them “inside” the narrative using techniques from traditional motion picture production and virtual reality combined with interactive features that facilitate the experience of the real world, all without wearable hardware.

“Navy Pier juts out 3,300 feet into the water, and our Centennial Wheel rises 200 feet into the sky, but Illuminarium breaks all boundaries by taking us places most of us would never see—transporting us across oceans--and under them—and sending us soaring beyond the reach of astronauts,” said Navy Pier President and CEO Marilynn Gardner. “We’re so thrilled to transform an underused location on the Pier into this year-round opportunity for people to explore the touch and feel, sights, smells, tastes, and sounds of distant worlds. The theater of the mind has never had such a boost as that provided by the immersive Illuminarium, where a journey that begins as a field trip could end as a career in the sciences.”

(illuminarium.com)