Studio History

Cartesian Theatre is a Vancouver, British Columbia, based private software company. It was federally incorporated in Canada in 2009.

The studio’s roots predated its incorporation as an extension of the founder’s private sector consulting work for industry, predominantly in the United States.

The studio has obtained expertise over more than a decade in a wide range of diverse software problem domains. These have included aerospace, artificial intelligence, gaming, bio–technology, digital audio, cryptography, distributed systems, simulation, and space science to name a few.

Engineering services have been provided in Canada, the United States, and abroad in China. Customers have included a multitude of small firms all the way to Digital Theatre Systems, Mozilla, Google, Wells Fargo and others.

In late 2013 the studio developed the technology to recover substantial portions of NASA’s billion dollar mission data from the first successful mission to the surface of Mars. The technology was subsequently cited by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Committee on Data for Science and Technology, and the last mission director of NASA’s Viking program mission.

In 2015 some of the studio’s technology for ultra high definition digital surround sound was showcased internationally at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, the premier venue for some of the world’s most sophisticated next generation technology.

In 2017 the studio collaborated with the National Research Council of Canada to develop agent based social simulation technology to simulate artificial life in large cities to model traffic flow, crime, pollution, gentrification, education, economy, and more.

The company’s name is borrowed from philosopher Daniel Dennett’s contribution to the field of philosophy of mind. It serves as a reminder that the outstanding and most interesting problems of artificial intelligence remain interdisciplinary in nature and are not limited to computing science.