SAT’s research center is developing several research projects, as part of its mission to support experimentation in creating collective experiences, and its vision of developing open, interoperable and accessible technologies.

Oriented towards the creation of collective experiences, each of these projects addresses one or more of the center’s research axes: intersensory immersion, co-creation and collective interaction.

Each project is carried out in partnership with players in the digital creation ecosystem, involving artists, researchers, academic laboratories and creative studios. The modalities of these collaborations are reinvented specifically for each project, to stay as close as possible to the interests of practice environments and research partners.

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.

All of our publications can be consulted in BibTex format.

The Innovation Department team brings together a wide range of expertise in a variety of roles:

• Directors are responsible for the funding and direction of the department’s research and development activities;
• Services and project managers are responsible for project execution and guidance;
• Researchers carry out systematic investigations to identify and solve problems, as well as monitoring, observing and modeling R&D processes to make them more sustainable and generic;
• Developers are responsible for implementing and maintaining the features and functional aspects of our technologies;
• Integrators act as the link between practitioners and the team, integrating our technologies into real-life creative projects at various stages ranging from exploration to production.

The department’s organization strives to be as cross-functional as possible, including at least one member of each of these profiles in each project and promoting feedback between their various expertise and skills.

Management

Véronique Paradis – Director of Innovation and Training

Pía Baltazar – Director of Arts-Sciences Development

Edu Meneses – Director of research

Jean-Michaël Celerier– Director of Technological Development

Managers and coordinators

Alexandra Marin –  Living Lab coordinator

Irène Le Moine –  Innovation Operations Coordinator

Marek Blottière – Research and Development Project Manager

Rachel Germain – Living Lab Facilitator

Carolina Moggia Aguillaume – Project Manager

Lou Evoy– Technical coordinator

Researchers

Manuel Bolduc – Researcher-Developer

Vincent Brault – Researcher-Trainer in Immersive and Interactive Visual Creation

David Ledoux– Researcher-Integrator in Sound Immersion and Scenophony

Vincent Berthiaume – Researcher-Developer in Embedded Systems and Audio Spatialization

Integrators

Bruno Colpron – Multimedia Integrator

Zachary L’Heureux – Multimedia Integrator

Charles Bicari – Integrator-Developer

Developers

Olivier Gauthier – Network and Backbone Solutions Developer

Guillaume Riou – Full-stack Developer

Sarah Al Mamoun – Multimédia UI / UX Developer

Matthew Hills–  Quality Assurance Analyst