We are proud to announce that Artanim has been selected by Cinzia Fossati (writer-director) and Laurence Moletta (writer-composer) to lead the Phase 1 R&D of Symphony of the Deep.
Today also marks an important milestone for the project, as we held our first review session with Cinzia — a moment we are glad to share through these first test pictures.
Conceived as a multi-user interactive XR experience, Symphony of the Deep invites participants to step into the world of sperm whales through a sensory journey shaped by sound, movement, and collective presence.
At the heart of the experience lies a clear environmental intention: to raise awareness of underwater noise pollution and human impact on marine ecosystems, by inviting participants to perceive the ocean through the sensory world of sperm whales.
At the core of this first R&D phase, Artanim is developing a multi-user VR prototype focused on two central challenges: embodied swimming techniques for collective locomotion, and real-time vocal echolocation as a shared mode of perception. Using their own voices, participants generate acoustic and visual echoes that gradually reveal the underwater environment, turning sound into navigation, interaction, and storytelling.
We are thrilled to bring our expertise to this singular and ambitious project, and excited to help shape the first movements of this immersive symphony.
This project is supported by Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), Migros Storylab, Cinéforom, Ville de Genève, and État de Genève, and is accompanied by Laetitia Bochud and Virtual Switzerland.
More to come soon…
To learn more about the project and follow its development, visit AVRIL or the project page.
We are excited to share an important milestone for MoRehab XR: we have just completed the feasibility study with 15 patients.
MoRehab XR is a project developed by Artanim in collaboration with Hôpital de La Tour, exploring how motion tracking and virtual reality (VR) can make shoulder rehabilitation more engaging, motivating, and measurable.
In this pilot study, patients undergoing rehabilitation after a Latarjet procedure, frozen shoulder, or rotator cuff repair participated in a series of gamified VR rehabilitation sessions. The results are very encouraging: all participants successfully completed the protocol, reported very low discomfort and perceived risk, and showed high interest and good perceived competence throughout the experience.
These first results support the feasibility, safety, and user acceptance of our current setup, and strengthen our motivation to move toward larger clinical validation studies.
A big thank you to everyone involved in this project — the clinical team (Alexandre Lädermann, Antoine Seurot, Hugo Bothorel), researchers, developers, artists, and of course the patients who took part in the study.
Our Ultramagic balloon flight simulator has been permanently installed at Espace Ballon in Château-d’Œx since January 2024, and one thing makes us especially proud: it continues to run in self-service mode, without constant supervision. In the world of VR, that is a real milestone.
Creating an immersive experience is one thing — creating one that is reliable, accessible, and durable enough to welcome visitors day after day is another. The experience invites up to three visitors to step into a virtual hot air balloon and fly together over the beautiful Pays-d’Enhaut, in a realistic simulation based on a detailed 3D scan of the region.
To mark this milestone, we’ve put together a trailer of the installation. Have a look — and if you’re in Château-d’Œx, come and try it for yourself!
Imagine collaborating with someone on the other side of the world and feeling as if they were standing right next to you — sharing the same space, interacting with the same objects, communicating naturally.
This is the vision behind PRESENCE, a European research project running from 2024 to 2027, bringing together 17 partners across Europe to rethink how social presence works in extended reality (XR).
The project explores three key building blocks for the future of social XR:
Ultra-realistic holoportation – capturing people volumetrically and bringing them into shared virtual environments as lifelike 3D representations.
Advanced haptics – enabling users to feel touch and physical interactions across virtual and real worlds.
Socially intelligent virtual humans – capable of generating interpersonal cues and interacting naturally with users.
At Artanim, we focus on enabling physics-based control for autonomous virtual humans, allowing them to respond to body-centric behaviour and interact with elements in their environment.
By combining these technologies, PRESENCE aims to redefine what “being together at a distance” truly means — unlocking new possibilities for remote collaboration, training, culture, and social interaction in immersive environments.
At Artanim we are exploring the use of movement controllers similar to the ones used to control robots, although doing so in physics simulations instead of in the real world. Our idea is that running these simulations in virtual reality (VR) will allow us to create characters with richer real-time reactivity. We believe this may be a step forward to improve the way autonomous virtual characters engage with their virtual environment, as well as a research path to provide characters that show lifelike behavior and some degree of nuanced interaction with VR users.
SOCIAL INTERACTION
Interpersonal Coordination in VR
Cognitive psychology and communication science have shown that people build rapport between them, in good part, through subtle behavioral cues, interpersonal coordination and loose but important rules relative to social space. Can we embed physics-based controllers with computational models that reproduce these mechanisms? (see Playing the mirror game in virtual reality with an autonomous character). What is the impact of implementing these computational models in VR experiences?
RESEARCH CHALLENGES
Technical Challenges
There are several technical challenges to address before we can explore questions related to interpersonal coordination and human-humanoid cooperation. The movement controllers need to be reliable, stable, solid, and easy to train, but also flexible enough to match the needs of a specific VR production scenario.
Every day we engage with physical objects in rich and subtle ways: we grab a cup by its handle intuitively balancing it, use it to pour tea in it and drink it readapting dynamically to the movements of the liquid in it, then use the cup to push some object on the table, before leaving it there for a while. However, manipulating objects in tasks that require rich contacts is still a matter of fundamental research, in robotics and control theory.
In addition, it is enough that we drink tea with someone else around for us to be willing to share the moment with them. We will change the dynamics involved in our gestures to show we take their interests and well-being into account. Can we create realistic social interactions among avatars and VR characters? This general question, focused specifically on body-centered interaction and interactive gestures, is what we are trying to answer in the EU Project PRESENCE.
