Immersive interactive technologies have the potential to build on Europe’s creativity, skills and cultural diversity, and impact various domains – from manufacturing, engineering and architecture to education, healthcare, the arts, entertainment and culture. Virtual Reality (VR), particularly, has come of age, now evolving, along with Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR), into a body of immersive technologies that come together under the all-encompassing notion of eXtended Reality (XR).
Thanks to the development of more comfortable, affordable and easier-to-use hardware, as well as the design of applications to support and leverage the advantages of this hardware, the once nascent XR technologies have now reached a tipping point for large scale adoption. Nevertheless, despite the advancements the application and adoption still suffers from a number of shortcomings like the separation of digital-virtual from the physical world, and limited collaboration between people. To address these shortcomings, the BRIDGES innovation action builds upon the product of collaboration between research and industry, expanding and augmenting it to deliver a flexible and scalable solution that can be applied to a variety of situations.
BRIDGES aims to support and boost the pan-European interactive technologies industry through the development of a holistic solution for (remote and co-located) group interaction in room-scale immersive mixed reality (or eXtended Reality - XR) environments that blend the physical and virtual space.
The BRIDGES solution is based on an existing platform, the Immersive Deck®, which has been researched and developed by consortium members TUW and IW. Within BRIDGES we are enhancing technical and operational aspects, piloting and testing it extensively in various domains to validate in real-world settings of major international airports in Germany and Greece for training firefighters and first responders, and in a highly visited cultural center in Greece, for enhancing the learning and recreational experience of visitors.
The extensive validation effort is expected to lead to the short-term commercial deployment of the BRIDGES end-results in the specific domains addressed by the project pilots, but also to provide replicability recommendations and scale-up guidelines for deploying the resulting XR platform in other industrial and entertainment domains in the longer term.
Overall Objectives of the project include:
· a set of custom and commercial off-the-shelf technologies, assembled into a complete XR platform installed at industrial and cultural settings for training and informal learning.
· a user-centered methodology and digital toolkit for creating and delivering multi-participant - sensorial XR experiences.
· a set of XR experiences, created to showcase the possibilities of the BRIDGES solution in training for fire fighters and visiting an ancient home
· an evaluation framework, produced after extensive testing to assess the effectiveness of the BRIDGES approach, and of XR at large.
