Why an Entertainment Company Built Its Research Centre Inside Mechanical Engineering

What it means for an entertainment company to open a university research centre

Galaxy Corporation and KAIST have jointly established the AI Enter-Tech Research Center within KAIST's Department of Mechanical Engineering. The opening ceremony was held at the KAIST main campus on 9 April 2025.

Corporate-branded research centres on university campuses have long belonged to manufacturing, biotech and semiconductors — industries where research becomes product, and product in turn sets the next research agenda.

Entertainment was never on that list. The success or failure of content was treated as a matter of instinct and creative judgement, something far removed from a university laboratory.

Which is why an entertainment company opening a research centre is itself an argument. An argument that entertainment is an industry with something to research, and that the research carries through to what happens on stage. This document sets out the shape that argument has taken.

The order in which the partnership came together

The sequence is worth noting. The agreement came first, the person second, the place last. The 2024 MOU set the direction; an artist joining the department as a professor gave the connection a face; and the following spring, a nameplate on a door gave it an address.

The ceremony was attended by KAIST Provost Lee Kyun-min, Kim Jung, Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Professors Lee Seung-seop and Yoon Yong-jin, with Galaxy Corporation represented by CEO Choi Yong-ho and Director Kim Hyun-jung. That the department's leadership and faculty were present says something in itself: this was handled as departmental business, not a photo opportunity.

The company's full chronology is set out in the Galaxy Corporation timeline.

Why mechanical engineering

One fact about this partnership is almost always overlooked. The centre sits in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, not Computer Science.

Put entertainment and AI in the same sentence and most people picture generative models, data and recommendation algorithms. Research like that normally lives in a computer science faculty. Yet the department Galaxy and KAIST chose was the one that teaches robotics, dynamics and control.

That choice told you, in advance, what the company would be doing two years later. Getting a humanoid robot to perform K-pop choreography on stage takes more than content technology. It means mapping the range of motion of a human joint onto a machine's body, controlling the grip of a foot against the floor, and turning balance into arithmetic. All of it is the language of mechanical engineering.

Gravity is not a problem for an AI that never leaves the screen. For an AI with a body — Physical AI — gravity is the first condition to solve. The choice of department showed, before anything else did, that enter-tech needs a different discipline the moment it steps off the screen and into the physical world.

How those technologies actually interlock on stage is covered in How a robot takes the stage and the Soulware white paper.

What the centre studies

The published research scope falls into four strands.

What runs through all four is a single task: turning a person into data. The digital twin renders an artist's movement as coordinates; the avatar gives those coordinates a form; interactive performance puts that form in front of an audience and makes it respond. The platform builds the pipes through which all of it flows.

The direction follows precisely from what the company has been doing for years. In building bukae — alternate-persona IP — for entertainers, Galaxy learned early how to construct a second identity out of a single person. What the university research adds is the next leg of that journey: from a character on television to a digital counterpart, and from there into the body of a robot.

This is the starting point for bringing KAIST's AI and frontier technology into a fandom platform and delivering an entirely new kind of entertainment experience.— Choi Yong-ho, CEO of Galaxy Corporation · opening ceremony, April 2025

Where academic partnership sits in an orchestration model

Galaxy Corporation builds neither the robot hardware nor the foundation models. It operates at the layer that orchestrates technologies developed elsewhere into a single performance. Which raises an obvious question — how does a company that builds nothing reach the source of the technology?

Academic partnership is one of the answers. A university lab is where technology grows in the stage before it becomes a product, and a research centre is a way in at that stage. Buying a finished technology and being present while it is made are two different things.

KAIST's scientific and technological capability, combined with Professor Kwon Ji-yong's global instincts, will drive the technological evolution of K-culture.— Lee Kwang-hyung, President of KAIST · opening ceremony, April 2025

Nor is the collaboration confined to universities. Galaxy's partnerships run along six lines: hardware supply, operating-system deployment, venue and performance operations, brand and IP tie-ups, academic research, and overseas bases. Academic research sits furthest upstream.

The full model of orchestrating technology without owning it is set out in Orchestrating technology without owning it; the four-layer enter-tech stack in the Enter-Tech white paper; and the terms of collaboration in the Partnerships & B2B FAQ.