SAT’s public research center aims to be a place for the production of technological and methodological commons that can be easily transferred to practical settings.

Our methodology consists in bringing out transferable technologies and methodologies from experiments in use. Through technological innovation, we aim above all for innovation in practice, centered around the processes of creating collective experiences.

Intersensory immersion

SAT is renowned for its pioneering role in collective audiovisual immersion, thanks in particular to its 360° dome, the Satosphere. To take collective immersion even further, the research center has been exploring its different uses and technologies for several years, with the aim of extending immersion to senses other than sight and hearing, and making it more embodied by involving the body and space. To this end, several research initiatives are being conducted in parallel:

• Haptic devices: with the development of an operational prototype of a haptic floor, creators can now involve the bodies of performers or spectators in unprecedented ways.
• Distributed dynamic scenographies: using the Puara physical computing device, which enables the management of various interconnected and distributed devices, we aim to facilitate the realization of dynamic scenographies or spatialized interaction devices.   
• Spatialization models for scenophony and intersensory immersion: we are conducting research to facilitate the implementation of collective immersion experiences in unconventional broadcasting contexts and for intermedia spatial control needs, often solicited for the design of immersive installations or live performances.

Collective interaction

Although interactivity is now at the heart of our daily experience of the world, it is often confined to enabling interaction between a person and a computer system. Within the SAT research center, and as part of our interest in collective experiences, we are exploring various aspects of collective interaction. The aim of this research is to create experiences in which groups of people can interact collectively with a reactive system or environment, or even interact with each other in new ways.

From a technical point of view, we are exploring various gesture capture modalities, and in particular computer vision systems based on non-contact, markerless capture: volumetric cameras, skeleton detection by AI models, LIDARs, etc. We are also working on data fusion strategies to aggregate these different techniques and modalities (as well as others, such as on-board sensors) and thus adapt to a diversity of creative situations and artistic production constraints.

Co-creation

Since its foundation, SAT has been interested in the use of telecommunications technologies to create remote collective experiences: this concern led to the development of the telepresence solution Scenic, which is now installed in 24 cultural venues in Quebec, and continues to develop in Canada and internationally. Beyond the creation of telepresence shows, the research center is also exploring the opportunities opened up by these technologies for collaborating remotely, in a more convivial and human way. Indeed, since the pandemic, it has become commonplace for all of us to collaborate remotely thanks to videoconferencing technologies. However, most of this collaboration takes place through screens, and we want to draw on our experience of telepresence, and in particular its scenographic aspects, to optimize the spatial and embodied aspects of remote co-creation.

In addition, more and more artistic approaches are using the means of AI for digital creation, and in particular generative processes based on machine-learning algorithms (machine-learning). These processes are embedded in creative processes, as well as in the thinking and decision-making they underpin, and thus involve a form of co-creation between humans and machines. From this perspective, we aim to question the specific needs of contemporary digital creation to which AI could respond, in order to bring to light new research and development trajectories and help structure the emergence and development of AI commons for digital creation.