Deloitte acquires Australian VR and AR expert Well Placed Cactus

Multinational professional services giant Deloitte has bought virtual and augmented reality expert Well Placed Cactus (WPC) in a move that sees it strengthen its digital expertise.

With engineers based in Melbourne and Brisbane, WPC was founded in 2012 and is a game and interactive experience producer, using technologies such as virtual reality and augmented realty.

The WPC team will form a new Digital Emerging Technology team within Deloitte Digital, in Deloitte’s Consulting practice, and will be led by Deloitte Digital Lead Partner, Steve Hallam.

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Hallam said: “We believe emerging technologies will have a profound impact on both organisations and individuals. Bringing WPC team’s engineering expertise in-house is a natural evolution of our end-to-end digital offerings to use fringe and emerging technologies for our clients.

“WPC’s deep technical understanding allows us to move from the realm of generating great creative ideas into also building and delivering them, which is really exciting.”

Well Placed Cactus CEO Jack Gillespie will become a director at Deloitte, with other senior personnel also taking on managerial roles. Gillespie said: “Our team has worked with Deloitte on some cutting edge projects over the past couple of years and we’re thrilled to integrate our technical expertise into Deloitte Digital's existing creative capability.

“For an organisation of Deloitte’s scale to bring an established emerging technology team in-house is a huge step forward for the industry.”

Among the projects already delivered by WPC and Deloitte include the award winning ANZ Virtual Garden in Sydney’s Martin Place – a three storey high interactive garden installation.