The "Saline Royale of Arc et Senans", mystical place dedicated to utopia, dreams and imaginaries, pursue its explorations in the spaces of the future and proposes an interactive installation which allows the visitors to venture in the narrative spaces.

From the 19th of November till the 2nd of December 2001, an interactive course will be set up by the European consortium <art.live>. Transportation in fictional spaces called <transfiction> in the technical-technical jargon will allow the children (but also adults) to travel in the primer of the serial of the stories of "Orbae Geographers" of the illustrator François Place, edited by Casterman Editions.

Spectator become actor, you are submerged in interactive pictures while being the actor of your own trip as your movements and action influence the good course of this one ! This installation allows transporting in real time persons in fictional spaces, so to submit them to a <transfiction>.



The transfiction system is composed by a large video screen and a digital camera, filming in continuous the visitor which is in front of the screen, as well as a software system controlling everything. This one is based on an exclusive technology on intelligent computer vision and the treatment of numerical images. Thanks to its algorithms, the system is able to identify, in the video flow received from the camera, subjects being at the front stage and to separate them of the scene. We have that effect now in the cinema and television with the technique of the blue screen, which further allows to substitute any image (this is the way the weather forecast is presented).

But the transfiction system goes further as it doesn’t need any particular scene, and that it does analyse the results with intelligence, which allows the system to capture the movements of the persons. Afterwards, the images extracted of the original video are integrated in a virtual graphical scene, which reacts in an interactive manner to the behaviour of the filmed subject. The whole is working in real time that allows the "spectator", become interactor, to observe directly the effect of his movements on the scene shown on the screen, and to the internaute to follow it in direct on the network when diffusion is foreseen. Moreover, the system presented to the saline Royale will put two screens side by side : competition and collaboration between the two persons.

The consortium <art.live> which is working with different research laboratories (LLN, Lausanne, Grenoble, Lisbon, Paris), small enterprises and Casterman Editions, in order to explore new manners of telling stories with new technologies. The multimedia installation mixes reality and virtuality, relying on cameras, computers, servers and Internet Network. This system of virtual reality is developed by the consortium <art.live> and the future spin-off of the Laboratory of Telecommunication at the University of Louvain (UCL, Belgium).

Virtual immersion, interaction and collaboration are the mechanisms of this project, which is new in Europe. The transfiction system has been selected for Imagina 2000 (Village of the Innovation, staying between about twenty projects), as well as for an exhibition in Bercy (a clip has been realized in the serial "Demain s’imagine aujourd’hui" of TF1 ; and "Libération" underlined that children "love it" !).