Dive into the urban universe of 2040, as imagined by the novelist Alain Damasio - XR New Images 2020 Award

Download the MOA mobile application!

📱 App Store : https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/id1515905833

📱 Play Store : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.francetv.innov.moa

The idea

MOA, My Own Assistant is an interactive augmented reality application for smartphones. The walls haven't changed, it's the overlay of augmented reality that is transforming the city. Public space has become a place of mixed surveillance and marketing, omnipresent. Your personal assistant accompanies you, loves you, and tracks you down, smoothly.

Propelled in 2040, you have entrusted your life to an artificial intelligence that knows you by heart. Decisions, relationships, purchases, everything has become simple. It gently guides you in all the solicitations that unfold around you. Place your trust in it, collect your citizen points and you may even reach the Premium package!

Science fiction? If only... 

To test this experience in good conditions, you will need a headset, preferably for outdoor use. With your phone in your hand, in vertical mode, turn around to discover and interact with the world of MOA.The MOA application offers :

an original and interactive story lasting about twenty minutes; a dive into the near future, where your personal assistant deploys an augmented reality universe around you (daily life, services, advertising); a reflection on tomorrow's technologies and their impact on our lives, for all audiences.

Written by Charles Ayats, Alain Damasio and Fréderic Deslias, the 20-minute application is available online and in partner venues.

The trailer

MOA: Marie's point of view, producer at Red Corner

Red Corner has chosen to work on new technologies (VR, RA ) and/or with different narrations (interactive comics, 7 Lives, etc).

How did the MOA project come to you?

Charles Ayats and I have known Alain Damasio for several years now. He was one of the first testers of our virtual reality works SENS VR and 7 LIVES. We have been discussing digital creation for a long time, and his feedback on our work has been invaluable. Few renowned literary authors have experimented as he has with such different media: video games, radio, music, series... 

We were waiting for his latest novel Les Furtifs, published by La Volte with great impatience. The few elements we knew about had already made us want to think about an adaptation. When Alain and his publisher asked us to think about an extension of the book, we were happy and, it must be said, a little worried. How to find the right form for such a huge universe and such elusive creatures as the Stealthy? 

We quickly made a choice: to focus on the city of 2040 as built by Alain and the relationship of its inhabitants with the artificial intelligence that cuddles and stalks them relentlessly. For us, it was a way of making tangible a reality that is already beginning today in our relationship with machines: our thresholds of acceptance, our fascination, our fears. MOA has become a way to open up questions at work in the book and to share them with an audience that does not necessarily know it. 

How do you bring this type of project to life and what is the interest for you in promoting it?

At Red Corner, we have the chance to work on new forms with recognized talents from all walks of life. MOA is for us a continuation of what we started and pushes our field of experimentation a little further. Our co-producers are France tv but also the publishing house La Volte, the theater company le Clair Obscur, the Forum des images et Chroniques, the digital art biennial and Small Studio, specialized in the development of immersive content.

The diversity of the actors involved in the project shows us that the lines are moving and that our playground can now expand. MOA will be present on the blinds, but also before theater shows, in libraries and in places where it is very easy to make the application available to the public.

We are convinced that digital creation is essential to put into perspective crucial questions about our relationship with machines. By embodying them with characters, emotions, the thread of a story, we change the game of a debate that is not only technical, but profoundly cultural. 

MOA : point of view of the director and author of MOA : Charles Ayats

Why this application?

MOA is a window to the future. The experience of a day in 2040 with its chatbot and all its personalized services.

Many applications already collect our data, spy on our intimacies and capture our attention; but tomorrow, when an informational layer (a "mirror world"), will coexist through a simple pair of glasses, perhaps even in contact lenses, how dependent will we be on it?

MOA is a fiction of anticipation and awareness, an invitation to take one's time, to listen to the world around us, and to make a thoughtful use of new technologies.

What has AR allowed you or brought you that you would not have been able to obtain otherwise and what are the particular constraints of this technique? 

With MOA we want the player to experience this future concretely, to discover this "increase", this future projection that Alain Damasio sketches in the novel Les Furtifs. I think that we understand things more quickly when we experience them in situ, therefore with and through this device that we criticize.

As for the constraints, there are a lot of them. This technology is improving month by month but is still in its infancy (integration, occlusion, graphic capacity, ...). We had these constraints in mind, while trying to address the project to the widest possible audience, which has phones equipped with ARKit and ARCore software. This constraint limited us in the possibilities of interaction and geolocation, but our objective was in any case to privilege narration and immersion in this not so distant reality.

Gamification has always been at the heart of your work. Have you used PLAR in this spirit and if so, how has it helped narration?

AR was not added to "ludify" fiction. AR is the subject and medium, not the pretext to make the story "playable". Gamedesign or interactive storytelling sometimes come together, it's true, resulting in exceptional experiences, challenging the player at every stage of the story. For me the game is a vector of commitment and transmission of knowledge.Le gamedesign ou la narration interactive se rejoignent parfois c’est vrai, aboutissant à des expériences exceptionnelles, sollicitant le joueur à chaque étape de l'histoire. Pour moi le jeu est vecteur d’engagement et de transmission de savoir.

Here we make fun of this overbidding of "gamification"; "I'll give you a point if you do a good deed", the zero level of gamedesign. It is very destabilizing to see that this infantile gamification is already used by some governments, in some of the test cities citizens are rated and do not all have the same access to public services.