Back with his new craze, Guy Laliberté wished his Instagram followers a Happy New Year in an amphibious setting.
• Also read: Between physical and digital: skipped a new project for Guy Laliberté
Back with his crazy decoration full of frogs that allowed him to promote his new project last February, the founder of Cirque du Soleil wanted to wish “a super frog year”.
The character of Jee the Frog arose from the fact that he was often referred to as a frog because of his French-speaking Quebec origins. Guy Laliberté had fun playing this character almost a year ago before announcing on February 22nd his new project he calls “phygital”, this immersive experience that fuses the physical and the digital and was developed by Hanai World .
This new project relies on the metaverse, which connects the real and the virtual in the so-called mixed reality. Once again he collaborates with artisans from Quebec but also from all over the world to create this new platform.
Recall that in 2015 the businessman sold Cirque du Soleil for $1.5 billion. But it wasn’t until 2020, just before the pandemic, that he sold his last shares in the company to Caisse de depot et Placement du Québec (CDPQ) for US$75 million (CA$100 million).
The CDPQ had also been criticized for this investment, which is now worth zero due to COVID-19.
“No facts validated [en février] the possibility of a pandemic,” the great boss of the CDPQ, Charles Émond, mentioned in the parliamentary committee in 2020. He also specified that at the time of the transaction it was not foreseeable that the Cirque du Soleil would be forced to cancel all its shows on the the whole world.