Embedded in Cinespace Studios’s flagship Toronto Kipling Avenue complex, next to sound stages being used for major television and feature film productions, York University’s Immersive Storytelling Lab supports collaborative research-creation and technology development by artists and scientists to: 1) Advance best practices for content creation for immersive experiences and our own technology development in the area of head-mounted displays, amplifier design for phenomenological XR, and the creation of expressive software tools. Enabled by a range of 360 cameras, volumetric capture, 3D scanners, XR creation software and immersive displays, we use research-creation methodologies to interrogate ways of building and sharing immersive stories; 2) develop workflows and advance our foundational understanding of issues related to shooting, editing and interactivity design in immersive storytelling environments and offer new ways to create narratives that take advantage of immersive, sensing, interactive and expressive tools; 3) Pioneer new ways of conceptualizing augmented reality through experimentation with lock-in amplifiers that allow users to see the stories within which we are already immersed, allowing users inhabit the stories of sound waves, wifi signals, and light, thus establishing a new area of practice we are calling ‘phenomenological augmented reality’; 4) Advance policy discussions around the social implications of living connected lives in the context of networked, always-on camera and AR technologies, engaging in important conversation around ethics responsive to these technologies; 5) Train highly-qualified personnel in the use of equipment and in an understanding of immersive environments in a next-generation atelier-like environment situated alongside a commercial film studio where they can work and train across boundaries of art and engineering.

The Immersive Storytelling Lab enjoys affiliation with both the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design’s Sensorium, a research centre for creative inquiry and experimentation at the intersection of the media arts, performance, and digital culture and with VISTA, a $22M collaborative program funded by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund connecting five faculties and over 50 academic, non-profit and commercial partners that seeks to expand and integrate the potential of visual neuroscience, computer vision, arts and humanities to tackle 21st Century challenges.