London’s Outernet Immersive (And Free) Visuals Experience Continues To Impress And Draw Crowds

October 2, 2023 by Dave Haynes

One of the sites I really wanted to see a second time while in London was the Outernet development in the center of the city, on the fringes of Soho and beside the Tottenham Court Road Station on the new-ish Elizabeth Line subway. It’s pretty amazing.

The Now Building, the primary venue that has some 23,000 square feet of 16K LED screens, was packed with people when we stopped by – backing up suggestions by the commercial property owners that the site is already a top five visitor attraction in the UK.

It helps, of course, that admission is free, adjacent to a very busy subway stop and near other tourism magnets like Leicester Square (ugh), Oxford Street (more ugh, unless you shop for candy or what the Brits call “tat”) and the British Museum.

Immersive is a heavily abused term in our business, but the venue truly is immersive, because the walls and ceiling are all fine pitch LED and the creative running on it was developed with this in mind. You walk in off the street and you are somewhere else.

One good measure of whether this works is looking at what people are doing. The crowds inside were sitting and taking it in, or capturing video on their phones.

One sequence put onlookers inside a lavish old building (above), and a different one associated with NASA was in a space station.

I dunno what this third one was about, but whoever designed it was (maybe) on mushrooms. 🙂

A must see if you are in this industry and passing through London. More posts about it here …

Here’ a podcast I did with an Outernet exec earlier this year.