The Drawing Space

The Drawing Space is an immersive telepresence experience developed at SAT (Montréal, Canada) that was showcased in September 2013 between FACT (Liverpool, UK) and SAT. In the words of its creators:

Standing within a 360˚ panorama of interactive video displays, users can navigate a sprawling digital terrain, using gesture-recognition and a hand-held controller to intuitively explore the environment and leave their marks within it. Through the interactions of participants, the field of drawing expands outwards from the centre, audiences are able to journey outwards and view the marks left by previous users; the project allowing participants to simultaneously travel across space and backwards through the project’s timeline.

More information on the project can be found on the SAT web page presenting the September 2013 event: http://sat.qc.ca/fr/evenements/lespace-dessiner-drawing-space

I had the opportunity to design the audio component of the experience as a sound design intern at the SAT Metalab from July to September 2013. The project makes use of the SPIN framework to host the virtual world. All audio is generated using PureData from OSC messages received from the SPIN server, and rendered to a surround sound system. The voices of the users are also spatialized, further bringing a sense of physical presence to the long-distance communication.

The following video demonstrates the audio behaviour of some of the interactions available in The Drawing Space: exploring, building and drawing.

Credit titles for The Drawing Space
Initial concept: Nicolas Bouillot, Luc Courchesne, Emmanuel Durand, Alastaire Ilbeck, Chris Nolan, Alexandre Quessy, Michal Seta.
Concept development and coordination: Luc Courchesne, Emmanuel Durand
Interaction design and implementation: Emmanuel Durand, Pierre-Antoine Chesnel
Integration: Emmanuel Durand, Michal Seta, Nicolas Bouillot
Soundscape design and implementation: Mathieu Bonneau
Liverpool base team: David Ogle, Ana Botella, Lesley Taker, Mark Murphy, Adrian McEwen

Credit titles for the Posture Platform
Concept, design, development, coordination: Luc Courchesne
Installation design and implementation: Luc Courchesne
Point cloud capture: Bruno Roy, Emmanuel Durand
Spatial editor (SPIN): Mike Wozniewski, Louis Bouchard
Data streaming software (Scenic): Nicolas Bouillot

The Drawing Space – Montreal/Liverpool is produced by Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) in Montréal and FACT in Liverpool and with support from the Quebec Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieure, de la Rechercie, de la Science et de la Technologie (MESRST), the Quebec Ministère des Relations Internationales (MRI), the Quebec Delegation in London and the British Council. Special thanks to Monique Savoie, Mike Stubbs, Sarah Dawbarn, Maud Laflamme and Marie-Michèle Tremblay.