Emmanuel Durand

This hands-on class will allow artists to use open-source tools to create interactive and immersive experiences. These tools have been created and incubated at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), a unique non-profit organization in Canada whose mission is to democratize technologies to enable people to experience and author multisensory immersions. During the class we invite participants to use their favorite software on platforms they are already familiar with, to interface with our tools. The toolset will include transmission protocols, video mapping tools, sound spatialization software, and gestural control using pose detection. The class will be organized in two parts: a presentation of the tools and context involving the development and applications, and a hands-on session with an ephemeral immersive space. This event is designed for art researchers, artists, designers, content creators, and other creatives interested in creating immersive spaces using research-developed tools. Participants will learn how to employ open-source tools for different artistic tasks so that they will be able to deploy their own immersive spaces after the class.

We present LivePose: an open-source (GPL license) tool that democratizes pose detection for multimedia arts and telepresence applications, optimized for and distributed on open edge devices. We designed the architecture of LivePose with a 5-stage pipeline (frame capture, pose estimation, dimension mapping, filtering, output) sharing streams of data flow, distributable on networked nodes. We distribute LivePose and dependencies packages and filesystem images optimized for edge devices (NVIDIA Jetson). We showcase multimedia arts and telepresence applications enabled by LivePose.

Perceptually accurate colour reproduction is a core requirement of video mapping applications, where objective evaluation of colour rendering chain taking into account human perception becomes greatly beneficial. In this article, we present a workflow for colorimetry evaluation of video mapping software rendering chain, that we implemented in open-source video mapping software Splash, with a set a common metrics for image quality assessment and tools for colour reproduction evaluation. We introduce an accompanying graphical visualization template to help accurate interpretation of the metrics used. We describe different use case examples that we performed with our tool, proving the workflow efficient for simple, understandable and reproducible colorimetry evaluation.

This paper aims to explore the impact of a collective immersion on learners’ engagement and performance. Building on Bandura’s social learning theory and the theory on the sense of presence, we hypothesise that collective immersion has a positive impact on performance as well as cognitive, emotional and behavioural engagement. Ninety-three participants distributed in four conditions took part in the experiment. The four conditions manipulated the collective and individual dimensions of the learning environment as well as the high and low immersion of the learning material. The two conditions that offered a high immersion setting used two types of the novel immersive dome: a large one for collective immersion and a small one for individual use. All participants were presented with the same stimuli, an 8-min-long video of a virtual neighbourhood visit in Paris in the 18th century. The participants’ reactions were measured during and after the task. The learning outcome, as well as the cognitive, emotional and behavioural engagement, were measured. Final results showed that collective immersion learning outcomes are not significantly different, but we find that collective immersion impacts the cognitive, emotional and behavioural engagement of learners.