Activities and results of the project during this 1st reporting period can be grouped into two main categories. The first is developing a multi-site, open application /network system to enable immersive telepresence applications and secondly to open this platform to a wider community to offer testing and developing possibilities to 3rd parties.
The 1st objective and group of activities can be further split into:
1. development of the multi-site aspect of the platform
2. carry out and implement innovations at different layers to support telepresence
3. define and test a limited set of specific use-cases to evaluate the telepresence platform.
Towards each of these objectives, progress has been made during this 1st reporting period. The different (individual) testbeds, which were available at the start of the project, were further developed with new tools, new APIs, .. and were interconnected, now offering the envisaged multi-site environment, however still not in a fully operational mode. A third testbed has been included to deal with scalability requirements put forward by the Open Call 1 proposers and initial experimentation for holographic conferencing is already offered.
Various innovations have been developed covering key aspects of collaborative telepresence dealing with content formats, network resource management, scalability, split rendering, and security. Both hologram- and avatar-based immersive communication platforms are integrated into the project testbeds and ready for open call partners and end-user validation. Additional innovations are in the phase of integration onto the testbeds.
To test and evaluate the SPIRIT platform, a limited set of 4 specific use cases were defined:
Use Case 1 – "Multi" - Multi-source live telepresence
Use Case 2 – "Hologram" - Live holographic telepresence
Use Case 3 – "Avatar"- Real-time animation and streaming of realistic avatars
Use Case 4 – "Robot"- Distributed steering of Autonomous Mobile Robots
The 2nd major objective, i.e. opening the SPIRIT platform to external users was succesfully achieved through the 1st of the 2 planned Open Calls. This initial call attracted over 60 applications from more than 15 countries, with over half submitted by SMEs.
Of these applications, 44 were deemed feasible in view of the current status of the SPIRIT Platform. And 11 proposals were granted following an external review process. The proposals spanned more than ten industry sectors, with the chosen experiments focusing on applications in Manufacturing, Education, Entertainment, Healthcare, and Universal fields. These Open Call experiments are anticipated to provide valuable feedback on the SPIRIT platform’s limitations, performance, usability, and readiness, ultimately informing the addition of new features and innovations.
