One of AMVALOR's missions is to identify companies' needs in terms of innovation.
Crédits photos : AMVALOR
A key player in research and innovation in immersive technologies, AMVALOR will be exhibiting at the Laval Virtual VR/AR event on April 9-11, 2025. The research institute, located throughout France, will be presenting its missions and actions to connect the world of research with business. A number of students will also be on hand to talk about the training courses in virtual reality and 3D. We spoke to Benjamin Poussard, Research Engineer and AMVALOR Manager at the Institut Arts et Métiers de Laval.
Can you tell us more about your company?
AMVALOR is the promoter of Arts et Métiers’ partnership research activities. This firm facilitates relationships between laboratories and companies that are looking for technological solutions, skills in research and industrial transfer or training for innovative projects. AMVALOR reinforces the coherence between Arts et Métiers’ scientific and commercial activities, and gives greater visibility to the skills offered by the Arts et Métiers network.
AMVALOR’s first mission is to identify companies’ needs for technological and innovation evolutions. Then, it mobilizes technical scientific and educational teams of Arts et Métiers to develop appropriate responses. The subsidiary can rely on the 15 research laboratories of the school to conduct research partnerships, studies, measurements and tests, technology intelligence operations, or organize theme days. It coordinates, organizes and manages projects. Another major aspect of AMVALOR’s work is to encourage and assist the transfer of knowledge from Arts et Métiers laboratories (products, material, processes, know-how) to companies, with the help of its transfer teams and technological platforms.
Finally, AMVALOR promotes emergence and creation of startups by taking part in investment funds such as Pertinence Invest. It develops activities to valorize intellectual property of Arts et Métiers labs (licencing, spin-off incubation, equity investments…) to increase the economic impact of innovative ideas from research studies.
The Arts et Metiers institutes from Laval and Chalon-sur-Saône will be represented at Laval Virtual. For over 30 years, our institutes’ research and development teams help companies in their digital transformation and their XR technology projects. We also enabled project leaders to create their own business based on these technologies.
What will you exhibit at Laval Virtual?
Our company will be at booth A63 and will present the activity of Arts et Métiers, as well as progress on the JENII project, presenting the development of immersive, interactive digital twins for educational use.
For the Arts et Métiers group, we’ll be presenting our three main areas of activity: research, training and innovation. On the research side, we’ll be presenting our institutes’ research on digital methods and user experience. On the training side, we’ll be promoting the MTI3D (Management of 3D Interactive Technologies) and TEEF (Emerging Technologies for Education and Training) Masters. Both courses are available under apprenticeship and professionalization contracts. Finally, on the innovation front, we’ll be presenting our support services for companies wishing to explore the new uses of XR and develop their R&D (Research and Development) via the AMVALOR structure.
For JENII, demonstrations will be presented, and project leaders from the Arts et Métiers group, CNAM, CESI and CEA will be here to share their expertise and feedback.
Are you planning any activities or demos at your booth?
This year, we are showcasing research and engineering projects with theme areas.
First, JENII (interactive, immersive and digital teaching twins) will be presented with the latest updates of the digital twins and feedback from teachers who use them in their lessons. This project is in partnership with the CNAM, CESI and CEA.
Besides, AMVALOR from Laval and Chalon sur Saône with their partners, Efectis lab and l’Usinerie Partners, worked together to develop an interactive and immersive simulation tool in real-time with sensory feedback in order to reproduce the realistic environment of fire flashes. This innovative project was conducted with the help and support of SDIS 71.
PhD students from the lab will be here to present their thesis topics with posters and demonstrations. Subjects like embodiment and social presence will no longer hold any secrets for you. Do you know the CIFRE (Industrial Agreements for Training through Research) package ? Our partner HRV will do us the honour to provide us with a Cycleo device to address the topic of CIFRE on motivational factors in the use of an immersive, interactive physical and cognitive stimulation device.
2025 is also the year when we inaugurated our capture platform at the Laval Virtual Center. This platform will combine different capture equipment (motion capture, volumetric capture. Carried out by Arts et Métiers, AMVALOR and CLARTE, this platform can guide you in any of your capture projects (preservation of technical skills, training, education, culture, etc.).
And surprise! A mixed-reality animation will also be on offer to discover our virtual agent activities. That’s all we can say for now…
Like every year, students of our MTI3D Master’s degree will also exhibit a project created during a two-week hackathon. It’s an opportunity to discover the skills acquired during our training program and to discuss with them about job opportunities or apprenticeships.
As part of this dynamic of educational innovation, we will also present the new work-study Master’s degree : TEEF. The aim is to train hybrid profiles with expertise in both pedagogy (pedagogical engineering, learning neuroscience, etc.) and emerging technologies (XR, artificial intelligence, etc.), to support the design and deployment of innovative training systems.
What innovation are you working on?
Two types of activity are at the heart of our concerns. At the Laboratory, part of our research focuses on the user experience in immersive virtual reality environments. Recent developments in language models are enabling us to rethink human-agent interaction. This subject has two impacts on our activities. On the one hand, technological innovations are needed to enable fluid interaction with virtual agents made intelligent, and combining different fields of technical expertise. Secondly, the resulting cognitive impacts offer a new spectrum for our researchers to explore.
On a technological level, new digital methods, via machine learning and model reduction, enable us to envisage new representations and interactions with complex data. The Arts et Métiers group is heavily involved in these scientific and technical skills, from digital modeling to the human-machine interaction that makes use of these models.
How is your solution transforming your business field?
For over 30 years, Arts et Métiers has been shaping the French and international XR landscape. On the one hand, we have the alumni of our training courses, who represent a significant proportion of the managers and technical advisors of XR companies in France.
These former students, trained at Arts et Métiers, have used their skills to create companies that are making a difference today, exploiting XR for relevant uses. These include technology companies such as CLARTE, Light and Shadows, Pixyz, Unity, ON-X, Google and Immersion, all of which have alumni from our training courses among their ranks, as well as user companies such as ALSTOM, SAFRAN, DASSAULT and VINCI, which have also called on our students to deploy these technologies in their processes.
From an innovation point of view, Arts et Métiers has always been ahead of the game in the creation of new algorithms, software or technologies enabling new uses in industry, training and healthcare. This has enabled the optimization of industrial processes, training in complex procedures, and also the birth of new companies equipped with technologies dedicated to their business processes.
Sustainability and the environment are key topics of this century. How do you cope with these concerns in your XR technologies?
Sustainability and environment are extremely complex challenges to combine with the reality of the new technology world. The Arts et Métiers group is very aware of these topics and conducts research and training activities about these questions, especially at the Chambéry institute. From the very start, we have been promoting uses that improve a situation, reduce health risks for users, or reduce the use of raw materials.
We were among the first to produce demonstrators for firefighter training, limiting the amount of fuel needed to handle extinguishers or identify smoke. We have also developed scanning and immersive training solutions, enabling users to optimize material consumption, and also proposed global design and local production processes, powered by XR, and enabling the carbon footprint of a custom manufacturing project to be reduced.
We are also working with various experts in the field to measure the impact of the XR in a wide range of applications. In some cases, the impact may not be negligible, and at that point we need to ask ourselves what the benefits of such use are.
