SHARED REALITY: Cosm transports guests to the best seat in the house on every play. (James Zoltak/Staff)
Fans Pack Inglewood Venue For LSU-USC
INGLEWOOD, California — Move over virtual reality. Step aside augmented reality. Make room for what’s being called “shared reality.”
That’s part of what’s on offer at Cosm, the new immersive entertainment venue that opened in July at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, California.
The second of three Cosm venues opened in Dallas on Saturday (Aug. 31, 2024) at Grandscape in The Colony. The venue’s first event was a triple-header of Week 1 college football games: the Clemson vs. Georgia blowout, the more competitive Texas A&M vs. Notre Dame tilt, and on Sunday, USC vs. LSU from Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.
In Inglewood, the three-level, 2,000-capacity venue might be described as a sports bar on steroids, but that does not tell the whole story.
The Hollywood Park Cosm doesn’t look like much more than a multiplex theater from the outside, but inside, an 87-foot diameter LED dome transports attendees to any number of stadiums and arenas.
Cosm promises elevated food and beverage, all handled in-house, with items like tempura Shishito peppers, soft pretzels with coarse mustard, chicken wings flavored with Cajun rub or lemon pepper and Korean Cheese Corn Nachos, among many others.
A third floor outdoor plaza overlooks SoFi Stadium and offers views of the new Intuit Dome and airliners on final approach to Los Angeles International Airport.
Cosm has its own camera positions at games, although one sideline cherry picker-type boom shook at times, causing guests to groan at the disorienting effect. It wasn’t clear if that was a Cosm rig, but the pylon cameras at NFL games are Cosm’s technology.
The shaking glitch was brief. The rest of the time, camera angles shifted smoothly, giving viewers a view from the best seats in the house on every play.
Corey Breton, Cosm’s head of venues, says the word of mouth has been huge.
“What we’re seeing go viral at Cosm, it’s kind of becoming a thing, is where people that only have like 500 followers are coming to a date night at Cosm with their significant other and taking a video and posting it on Tiktok, and it’s getting over a million views,” he said. “That type of stuff you really can’t predict, but also that’s the beautiful nature of what we’re doing.”
Cosm acquired Evans and Sutherland before the pandemic. The company has a 75-year history in running and operating over 700 planetariums and produces simulations for the U.S, military. It also acquired Spitz, whose projection domes are chosen by customers including Disney, Universal Studios, Volkswagen, Griffith Observatory and Zeiss, according to Breton.
“We acquired them, and c360, which is the pylon cams for NFL games. That’s our camera technology that we’re using to grab that panoramic view,’ Breton said. “if you think about the vertical integration, what we’re able to do, we acquired all these companies, stacked them on top of each other, and they perfectly complement and then now that creates Cosm. We continued that as a mindset, instead of outsourcing.”
In the end, jubilant USC fans filed out alongside a surprising number of disappointed LSU fans, one of whom agreed the experience was unique and worth the $100 price of admission, if not for the ending, which saw the Trojans pull out a 27-20 victory over the favored Tigers in a back-and-forth contest.
