Once upon a time, Yves Jacquier was a research engineer at CERN, working on the world’s largest particle detector as part of the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Since 2004, though, he has been at Ubisoft, rising through IT and production services to found La Forge: a crossdisciplinary R&D department with the goal of bridging the gap between academic research and videogame production. Where once we might have expected major game publishers to guard their technical innovations jealously, this is becoming increasingly common practice: Electronic Arts, for example, has its own equivalent called SEED. When La Forge was founded at Ubisoft Montreal
