DIS group showcases XR results in ERCIM News magazine

Recently, ERCIM News 137 was published, with a special theme on eXtended Reality (XR). CWI’s Distributed and Interactive Systems group contributed four articles to this special theme.

The topics are the results of several national and international collaborations:

• VOXReality: Voice-driven Interactions in XR Spaces
• VR2Gather: A Platform for Adaptive Multiparty Social xR Communication
• 5DCulture: Fashion Exhibition and Social Virtual Reality
• TRANSMIXR: Enabling the future of Media Experiences through Social XR

VOXReality: Voice-driven Interactions in XR Spaces by Moonisa Ahsan, Irene Viola and Pablo Cesar (CWI)

VOXReality is an ambitious EC project, focusing on voice-driven interactions by combining Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) technologies in several Extended Reality (XR) use cases: VR Conference, AR Theater, and AR Training. CWI contributes with human-centric design approaches and dialogue system development, while actively engaging with users. This ensures that our XR interactions are not only technologically advanced but also user-friendly and intuitive.

VR2Gather: A Platform for Adaptive Multiparty Social XR Communication by Irene Viola, Jack Jansen, and Pablo Cesar (CWI)

Extended Reality (XR) telecommunication systems promise to overcome the limitations of current real-time teleconferencing solutions, by enabling a better sense of immersion and fostering more natural interpersonal interactions. To achieve truly immersive communication, high-fidelity representations of our own bodies and faces are essential. Enter VR2Gather: a customisable end-to-end system to enable multi-party communication with real-time acquisition.

Reaching Behind the Glass: Fashion Exhibition and Social Virtual Reality - by Karolina Wylężek, Irene Viola and Pablo Cesar (CWI)

Museums’ objects continue telling the story of the past and educate us about the history. Sadly, they do not last forever. Luckily, new technologies come with solutions. At CWI, we decided to develop a social VR system that would allow us to experience and interact with objects long after their time has passed.

Together with curators from Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the European Fashion Heritage Association and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV), we came up with the idea of creating the exhibition inside a virtual environment. In the resulting exhibition, which will open in June 2024, we can collect data to assess the systems’ influence on visitors’ museum experience and learning outcomes.

TRANSMIXR: Enabling the Future of Media Experiences through Social XR - by Silvia Rossi, Irene Viola (CWI) and Pablo Cesar (CWI and TU Delft)

Thanks to the recent advance of Extended Reality (XR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, researchers in the European TRANSMIXR project are working on the future of media experiences by advancing the state-of-the-art in media production, delivery and consumption. We developed an open-source system for volumetric real-time interaction for social VR, collected user requirements and proposed new metrics to evaluate the quality and user experience in XR environments. TRANSMIXR aims at revolutionising the cultural and creative sector. It focuses on main domains of the cultural and creative sector, such as news media and broadcasting, performing arts, and cultural heritage.

Guest editors

Guest editors of the ERCIM News 137 special theme on XR were Ioannis Chatzigiannakis (Sapienza University of Rome and CNIT), Holger Graf (Fraunhofer IGD), Manos Kamarianakis (University of Crete), and Aris Lalos (ISI).

Other contributions

Apart from the four articles by the DIS group in the special theme section on XR, there were more (partly) Dutch contributions to ERCIM News 137: a summary (by ERCIM's Peter Kunz) of the ERCIM Visionary Event on Generative AI in Brussels co-organized by CWI's Han La Poutré (Vice President of ERCIM), a call for the 'Forum Beyond Compliance - Research Ethics in the Digital Age' (deadline 10 June) and an In brief item on Peter Grünwald's ERC grant.

About ERCIM

ERCIM - the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics - aims to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase co-operation with European industry. Leading European research institutes are members of ERCIM. CWI is one of its founders, together with Inria and GMD. ERCIM is the European host of W3C.

ERCIM News is the quarterly magazine, published by ERCIM. It has about 10,000 readers.

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