eXtended Reality Technologies (RIA)

The emergence of smart cities and factories, autonomous vehicles and homes, intelligent appliances in conjunction with Virtual and Augmented Reality applications are opening new ways to live, work, care, learn, play and socialize. Whilst people, places and objects are being digitized and transferred into the virtual world and placed spatially and contextually, sensors are embedded into our environments and the objects around us. New digital interaction technologies are playing an essential role in this transformation by enabling us to interact naturally and intuitively with digital information in the physical world.

This topic asks for research and innovation proposals to develop and demonstrate novel eXtended Reality technologies, combining human-machine interactions and real, mixed, augmented and virtual environments, aiming to augment the capabilities of users and machines and to provide seamless and persistent physical-digital experiences, while guaranteeing the privacy and rights of individuals and companies and ensuring safe, secure and trustworthy interactions.

Special attention will be given to including end-users and transdisciplinary research including social sciences and humanities, in order to deliver and enhance uptake of suitable, ethical and safe solutions.

Proposals should cover at least one of the following points and will provide well designed and fully tested scenarios in real-world environment for enhanced eXtended Reality experiences:

• devising innovative digital interfaces that take advantage of spatial computing to allow users to interact with real-time contextual information activated by intuitive sensory triggers;
• developing novel multi-user virtual communication and collaboration solutions that provide coherent multisensory experiences and optimally convey relevant social cues;
• improving the resilience, robustness, accuracy and semantic understanding of the current mapping and positioning systems, while providing real-time bidirectional synchronisation between models and interactive applications;
• facilitating the exploitation of 3D data acquisition techniques, enhancing its performance while reducing technology costs and providing efficient and scalable encoding, processing, storage and rendering means;
• enabling the construction of compelling context-aware and embodied experiences by providing solutions for the creation of convincing digital avatars and agents, with natural looking and physically realistic behaviours, movements and expressions.