Institute National Polytechnique de Grenoble - Computer Sciences and Artistic creation Laboratory

• Country - France
• Town - Grenoble

The Computer Sciences and Artistic Creation Laboratory (ICA), headed by Annie Luciani and Claude Cadoz, is a public-research Computer Science division of the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (INPG). It is strongly connected to the ACROE Institute. The ACROE-ICA group is well-known as a pioneer in the design and implementation of force-feedback gestural devices and multi-sensory real-time simulation platforms for Virtual Realities. It has developed an innovative force-feedback technology that allows the user to perform gestural tasks with a high degree of accuracy and expressiveness. In the 70's it has introduced physically-based modeling in Computer Animation and Computer Music. It developed a large panel of physically-based object models for the gestural, acoustical, and visual channels. It has also several computer-based platforms supporting real-time simulation, gestural action and perception, synthetic imaging, animation and synthetic sound, in a close and dense real-time multi-sensory interaction. It uses these platforms to perform works on psychophysics of haptics and multisensory interaction in co-operation with the LPNC (Grenoble, France).

The ICA Laboratory is a public research team situated at the interdisciplinary cross-point of Computer Graphics and Animation, Computer Music and Real-time Teleoperation and Virtual Reality Platforms. It has developed high performance technologies in force feedback systems and real-time multisensory simulation platforms, that are able, in a strong physically-based interaction, to produce simultaneously, synthesized sounds, 3D visual displacements and deformations as well as force signals in response to the human subjects action on virtual physically-based objects. These technological developments have been achieved according to gestures measurements and psychophysics intersensory evaluations. We use our equipment, technologies, concepts and know-how to perform innovant experiments in psychophysics through virtual physically-based multisensory situations. Conversely, the novel understanding and quantitative evaluations given by these experiments drive us to specify the technological evolution for the sensori-motor interfaces and multisensory representations and simulations (visual, acoustical, and gestural) in computerized tools, particularly in Virtual Reality Platforms.