LITIMS

We are facing a fundamental break in communication technologies with the advent of multisensory virtual and/or augmented realities whose potential applications are beginning to emerge, the most widely publicised being probably the Metaverse. The latter is expected to have a wealth creation potential of 5 trillion US dollars by 2030 (McKinsey report). Users will now be able to immerse themselves and interact with digital content involving a large number of sensory modalities, rather than simply viewing it. Drastic changes are thus to be expected in industrial, societal, medical and artistic applications. Therefore, fundamental questions related to multi-sensory immersive technologies, multimodal perception and immersive content creation become essential. To date, most Virtual Reality systems are based on the visual modality. Few systems combine several sensory modalities, yet it is well known that human perception relies on multimodality in order to reinforce or compensate for deficiencies in a given sense by the intervention of another sense. The reason for this is mainly methodological. Indeed, multi-sensory perception involves interactions that are sometimes extremely subtle. Thus, for example, if seeing the movement of a speaker's lips allows for a better understanding of what he or she is saying, a slight shift between the visual and auditory modalities is enough to make the message more complex (McGurk effect). The lack of genuine interaction between technological designers and scientific experts is a barrier that needs to be broken. The joint laboratory project between Immersion and the PRISM research laboratory aims at producing innovative immersive systems combining visual, auditory, vibratory and haptic modalities within a single paradigm privileging human perception and its propensity to manage distinct information flows. To this end, the two partners wish to combine their mutual skills in order to create a new synergy capable of producing systems at the cutting edge of immersive communication technologies. This synergy will initially take the form of a shared development platform, integrating Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality technologies for which Immersion has an internationally recognized expertise, with acoustic and vibratory immersion systems specific to the PRISM laboratory expertise. This platform, a genuine showcase of the joint laboratory, will be a privileged place for exchanges and experiments between the two partners and will allow the development of methodologies specific to the design of multi-sensory immersive systems adapted to humans. The know-how acquired by this partnership will allow to increase the competences and the products proposed by the Immersion Company, while providing the PRISM laboratory with a unique equipment for its fundamental research on multimodal interactions.