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March 12 (UPI) -- When Sakchin Bessette first co-founded Moment Factory, an interactive entertainment studio in 2001, airports like Singapore's Changi and Tokyo's Haneda were just starting to dabble with digital art. Today, Moment Factory is leading the charge, transforming travel hubs across the world into gateway destinations that create a buzz.
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Since its founding in Montreal, the studio has grown to more than 450 employees, with satellite offices in places like Paris and New York. In that time, Moment Factory has spearheaded projects ranging from the Super Bowl halftime show to tours with artists like Olivia Rodrigo and 100 Gecs.
An innovator in the entertainment and travel sector, the studio's signature style can be seen around the world, transforming established locations like the Kaleidoscope Kavern Lazy River in Tennessee and the Orchard, inside Qatar's Hamad International Airport.
Speaking with UPI, Bessette said the company's motto, "We do it in public," sums up the company's signature style of merging interactive, multimedia art into the real world.
In many cases, Moment Factory installations have become major draws for tourists and art lovers who now associate the interactive art with locations like the Changi airport, LAX, Moynihan Train Hall in Penn Station in New York City and Shinjuku Station in Tokyo.
At Shinjuku, the busiest train station in the world, Moment Factory partnered with Sony Music to create a new flagship multimedia installation at the east-west passage in 2022.
Using sound, lights and video, a Moment Factory crew of dozens installed The Color Bath, which saturates the space through which more than 3 million passengers pass every day in morphing blue, pink and purple hues.
Bessette said the company has been going through major growth over the last decade, spurred by growing competition between cities for tourists, and airlines and airports for customers.
"If passengers have a better experience at the airport, they're more likely to take a stopover at that airport versus another one," he said.
"A lot of our installations have been designed with the whole passenger experience in mind. Specific installations enhance the passengers' experience, sometimes distract from the lineups and security and enhance corridors or transition zones within the airport."
That work really kicked off in 2013 with a redesign of Los Angeles International Airport, Bessette said, but has since spread across the world, most recently landing in Singapore.
In New Jersey, the company transformed Terminal A of Newark's Liberty International Airport in 2022, adding a large-scale digital fresco which features a rotating lineup of New Jersey highlights.
Guests can take in a mix of practical flight information, intuitive boarding cues, and fun-to-know Jersey trivia as they venture toward their gate.
Bessette said the company will sometimes create a "theater of experience" -- basically an incredibly large LED screen combined with sound programming -- to relax passengers and softly entertain them while they're waiting in line.
"We want to create an ambience, kind of like a spa-like feeling, without it necessarily being distracting," he said.
Other installations, like the corridors at LAX, are more interactive, so when passengers walk by or a flight is ready to take off, the screens sync with the departures. In places like Changi, the studio has used weather data to provide visualizations, showing raindrop animations if it's wet outside or sunshine animations if it's warm.
Moment Factory's immense waterfall installation in Changi was designed as more of a show than a single piece of art, making the natural a spectacle. In Doha, Qatar, the company used similar tech to enhance the shopping and food courts of the airport.
Depending on the client and space, Bessette said, Moment Factory applies unique approaches to entertain, manage "pain points" or enhance the transitions within the airport.
He said the company's success at LAX has led to all kinds of opportunities programming new installations for places like the Las Vegas Sphere and music tours for acts like Madonna and Billie Eilish, as well as retrofitting iconic travel destinations like Notre-Dame Basilica of Montreal or the iconic Dôme des Invalides in Paris with its AURA experience.
Currently, Moment Factory has teams working on several projects simultaneously, including new installations at the Incheon International Airport in Seoul, the UNICEF Heart Strings program, which launches in late March in Houston, and the Messi Experience, an interactive experience that features soccer superstar Lionel Messi, which launches in April out of Miami.
