When people walk into Illuminarium Toronto for the first time, they usually stop talking. The room does that to people. What they're standing inside took years of technical planning, tens of thousands of hours of content production, and a purpose-built stack of hardware and software that, as far as we know, doesn't exist anywhere else in Canada.

Here's how it works.

The space: the Fermenting Cellar

The venue itself is historically significant. The Fermenting Cellar at the Distillery District is a 19th-century brick building that originally housed the fermentation process for Gooderham & Worts Distillery — once the largest distillery in the British Empire. Its 20-foot vaulted ceilings and 13,500 square feet of continuous floor space made it the ideal blank canvas for a full-surround projection environment. No other permanent immersive venue in Canada uses a heritage building of this scale.

Projection: 26 RGB pure laser projectors

The projection system is built around 26 of the world's most advanced RGB pure laser projectors. Unlike lamp-based projectors — which degrade in brightness over time and struggle with colour accuracy — pure laser systems maintain consistent luminance and colour fidelity over their operational lifespan.

RGB pure laser is significant because it allows for a wider colour gamut: the system can display colours that standard projectors (including lamp-based and blue-laser systems) simply cannot reproduce. For productions like Mythos, where precise cultural colour palettes matter — warm Yoruba golds, classical Chinese ink blacks, the natural greens of Turtle Island — this level of colour accuracy is essential.

The 26 projectors are edge-blended across every surface: four walls, the floor, and the ceiling. There are no visible seams. The world wraps around you completely.

Audio: 108 wall-embedded speakers

A standard theatre positions speakers at the front of the room and projects sound toward the audience. We do the opposite. 108 speakers are embedded directly within the walls, evenly distributed at multiple heights around the entire perimeter. Sound is mixed in three-dimensional space — not front-to-back, but from every direction simultaneously.

In practice, this means that when you're standing in the middle of a rainstorm in Mythos, the rain sounds like it's coming from above you, beside you, and behind you. When a character in Journey to Oz speaks from across the room, their voice follows them spatially. The audio system doesn't amplify a performance. It builds a place.

Interactivity: LiDAR and real-time rendering

The most technically complex layer is the interactivity. LiDAR sensors — the same technology used in autonomous vehicles to map three-dimensional space — track the position of guests throughout the room. This data feeds in real time into our content systems, allowing the animated world to respond to where people are standing and how they're moving.

The animated content runs on Unreal Engine — the same real-time 3D platform used in major AAA game development and Hollywood virtual production. The critical advantage of real-time rendering over pre-rendered playback is responsiveness: when a LiDAR sensor detects that a group of guests has gathered in the Great Race section of Mythos, the animals can orient toward them. When a child runs through the interactive floor zone, the floor reacts to their footfall. None of this is scripted in a traditional sense — it's a live system responding to a live room.

Content production pipeline

All content for Illuminarium productions is produced in-house by Secret Location. This includes original art direction, character design, animation, music composition, spatial audio mixing, and the integration of interactive systems. The pipeline is designed around the specific aspect ratios and resolutions of the projection surfaces — content that looks correct in the room looks nothing like content designed for a conventional screen.

Each new production requires approximately 12–18 months of development from concept to opening night, involving a team of artists, animators, engineers, cultural consultants, composers, and technical directors.

Private and custom use

Illuminarium Toronto's technical infrastructure is also available for branded events, private activations, film and photography shoots, and custom installations. We can run custom content — branded animations, spatial audio compositions, interactive activations — for events of up to several hundred guests. For specifications and availability, contact hello@secretlocation.com.