Inference Ground Truth

Inference Ground Truth / Johannes Pöll, Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe, Simon Schmid - Photo: Johannes Pöll

Open Futurelab

Exhibit

Inference Ground Truth

What If the Scanner Shapes the Reality It Records?

Johannes Pöll (AT), Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe (AT), Simon Schmid (AT)

Inference Ground Truth is space reshaped—an experiment in overlapping realities. It is a spatial setup using new methods of Gaussian Splatting to record volumetric traces of movement. The goal: to negotiate what ground truth might mean between human experience and machinic reality.

Visitors are encouraged to become part of the artwork, as interactive participants in a capture volume—with various aspects of the capture and processing cycle depicted on screen, resulting in a 4D Gaussian Splat.

Inference Ground Truth is one of the two winning projects of the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s internal competition Ideas Expedition 2025. It constitutes a continuation and evolution of one of 2024’s winning projects, Persistent Time Sink Resonance, which also experimented with the recent rasterization technique Gaussian Splatting.

POSTCITY, First Floor, Open Futurelab

  • Ars Electronica Futurelab

    The Futurelab is the Ars Electronica’s artistic R&D laboratory and atelier. Together with worldwide partners, the Futurelab strives to create works that reveal the transformative force that emerges when art, technology, and society converge. The goal is to use these works as a catalyst for future innovation and societal change. The outcomes build on the Futurelab’s Art Thinking method, Art Science Research, and Future Impact Creation for experimental, exploratory future prototyping.

  • Johannes Pöll

    Johannes Pöll has started as a researcher and artist at the Ars Electronica Futurelab in 2017. He performs as a Computational Noise musician under the moniker 11°22’4″142°35’5″. The multimedia artist is always looking for inspiration and experience at the crossroads of natural sciences, art and technology. Next to his work as lead designer at the Ars Electronica Futurelab he researches time-based, aesthetic processes of spatial art as an explanatory model of complex processes and reality.

  • Simon Schmid

    Simon Schmid is Lead Developer at Ars Electronica Futurelab. He joined the Spaxels drone team in 2016 as a software and embedded systems developer. With a background in biomedical engineering and robotics, his work explores assistive technologies, functional design, and intelligent systems. His focus includes robotics, mechanism design, exhibition development, and AI.

  • Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe

    Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe is Senior Artist & Designer at the Ars Electronica Futurelab. He is currently working on stereoscopic photography and videography as well as real time animation for 3D applications in Deep Space 8K. As a show designer, he was part of the Spaxels drone team from 2017 and developed workflows specially tailored to robot swarms for an intuitive and flexible design of drone animations.

Credits

Inference Ground Truth is a winning project of the Ars Electronica Futurelab Ideas Expedition 2025