3rd Open Call: Projects Selected for Phase 1
XR4ALL is the first initiative by the European Commission to strengthen the European XR Industry. Co-funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, XR4ALL not only offers a highly-connected XR community, but also stimulates and promotes innovative XR solutions via three open calls and a solution catalogue.
Each XR4ALL Open Call consists of 2 phases. During the 1st phase “concept validation”, all open call winners can access a lump sum €10,000 in order to develop and experiment with their ideas from both business and technical perspectives. Only half of the best projects are admitted to the 2nd phase “development and integration”, during which each project will receive another €40,000 as funding to develop a viable product.
The third and final XR4ALL Open Call launched in June 2020 closed on 16 November 2020. We are now thrilled to announce the 16 winners out of the 154 applications, who have been selected for the “concept validation” phase.
The winners are:
- 🇪🇸 CTIC Foundation-Technology Centre
- 🇩🇰 VRPRO ApS
- 🇩🇪 Jymmin GmbH
- 🇳🇱 MedicalVR
- 🇪🇸 Universidad Pública de Navarra
- 🇫🇷 InterDigital R&D France
- 🇮🇹 Sinergia Consulenze srl
- 🇦🇹 Practical Robotics Institute Austria
- 🇬🇧 Valkyrie Industries
- 🇪🇸 ESTUDIO BAY, SLU (VISYON)
- 🇮🇹 R2M Solution
- 🇬🇧 Queen Mary University of London
- 🇮🇹 BECOME SRL
- 🇬🇷 Cognitive Innovations Private Company
- 🇭🇺 Institute for Computer Science and Control
- 🇪🇸 Augmented Reality Software S.L.
MIRA, CTIC Foundation-Technology Centre
🇪🇸 Mixed Reality Remote Assistance
Spanish NGO CTIC Foundation-Technology Centre proposes a mixed reality remote assistance to enhance communication between remote experts and on-site operators for the sake of temporal and financial efficiency. CTIC intends to combine AR and VR with Digital Twin to build a real-time collaborative environment for both on-site and off-site sides.
Contact details: @fundacionctic, Pablo Coca Valdés, Director for Business Development and Operations
PNPVR, VRPRO ApS
🇩🇰 Plug & Play VR | Self-operating VR kiosk solution
VRPRO is a Copenhagen-based VR agency specialising in VR marketing, retail and customer experience. Their Plug&Play VR is a kiosk solution for Oculus Go which puts all VR devices in a removable kiosk, helping all storytellers to facilitate the exchange between content and audience for significant views in a cost and distribution effective manner. By streamlining the distribution process, boosting view-counts and significantly reducing cost-per-view for location-based VR experiences, the Plug&Play VR solution enables location-based VR to become relevant within more contexts and for more clients including retail brands, museums and science centers. This in turn will spawn market expansion and increased demand in virtual productions.
Contact details: Morten Skovbo Holst, Founding Partner
JYMIN for mimicry, Jymmin GmbH
🇩🇪 Jymin® App for facial movement and speech therapy
JYMIN is a Leipzig-based startup focused on combining fitness training with music creation. The app that is being developed uses XR technologies that capture the patient’s head, eye and face movements during mimicry training therapy. Thanks to this app, the patient will increase training engagement through direct music-visual feedback, and the therapist will be able to easily set up a training program for the patient.
Contact details: Gregor Urban, Project Manager
MVR, MedicalVR
🇳🇱 The future of lung-sparing surgical planning is now
MedicalVR develops pre-operative planning for cardio-thoracic surgeons by leveraging patient specific CT-scans and VR technology. The application visualises the patient-specific anatomy of organs in their natural states and enhances surgeons’ agency as they interact with the virtual organ to plan a surgical path. Thereby, their surgeries can be better planned, resulting in organ-sparing procedures whereby the unnecessary removal of healthy tissue is avoided for instance. With the XR4ALL call, MedicalVR plans to further develop the VR application to fine-tune interaction with the 3D model and improve bodily structures identification and labeling.
Contact details: Chris Hordijk, CEO and founder
HandTeleXR, Universidad Pública de Navarra
🇪🇸 Hand Teleportation for Remote Assistance in the Operation of Technical Equipment
Spanish university Universidad Pública de Navarra is creating hand teleportation plugins for systems, which will integrate hand tracking technology in remote assistant applications based on widely used frameworks. The end-product enables remote supports for machinery maintenance and repair. The AR remote collaboration between remote experts and local operators will significantly benefit factories and construction sites.
Contact details: @UNavarra, Dr. Oscar Ardaiz
Light4AR, InterDigital R&D France
🇫🇷 Light estimation for consistent cast shadows in AR
Current AR applications rarely represent photorealistic augmented scenes, while there is no solution for accurate light source estimation on the market as of now. InterDigital R&D France aims to make a difference by integrating algorithms into a wider application development toolkit and thereby, enabling more realistic AR applications where virtual shadows are rendered consistent with the real lighting of the environment.
Contact details: @InterDigitalCom, Matthieu Fradet, Senior Scientist
DeepReality, Sinergia Consulenze srl
🇮🇹 Automatic Content Generation for eXtended Reality Applications
Despite the advancement in the XR applications, the tracking systems and generalisation are still limited. The DeepReality project is aimed at overcoming these limitations by implementing a Unity Plug-in, specifically designed to allow a smart integration of Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning algorithms within XR applications. Deep Learning will improve environmental tracking by the app, and will train Deep Neural Network to automatically generate 3D contents.
Contact details: @sinergia_pesaro, Dr. Roberto Pierdicca, Post doc research fellow and contract professor
VR4HRC, Practical Robotics Institute Austria
🇦🇹 Virtual Reality for Human Robot Collaboration
Human-robot collaboration improves work efficiency and capacity, but safety of such work methods is worth full attention. The focus of the project VR4HRC will be to develop a VR solution which enables easier development, engineering and supervision of collaborative robotics systems. The developed VR framework will be able to simulate industrial robots and to interact with them intuitively. By including a physics engine with collision detection and inverse kinematics, the realism of the virtual environment of the proposed solution aims towards the physical space. The novelty lies with having VR integrated with ontology to describe the robot and environment, while enabling automatic configuration of the VR4HRC framework from the semantic description of the system.
Contact details: Dr. Munir Merdan, Scientific Director
TaViSc, Valkyrie Industries
🇬🇧 Tactile Virtual Sculpting
Valkyrie Industries has been developing haptic gloves to deliver the tactile impression to VR simulations. This project aims to create a VR sculpting software in combination with their haptic gloves while implementing mesh deformation. The sculpting haptic VR tool will become an enabler for many non-experts while allowing a natural and quick work with 3D objects for professionals and may be used by sight-impaired people.
Contact details: @ValkyrieInd, Dr. Ivan Isakov, Director
VRACCESSMOB, ESTUDIO BAY, SLU (VISYON)
🇪🇸 Accessible VR prototype for people with reduced mobility
As part of an Industrial Doctorate, this project develops an accessible VR prototype for people with reduced mobility by means of a bot-type virtual assistant, enabling immersive visits to cultural or educational environments. A comparative experimental study with real users using the Pico Neo 2 Eye VR device which will be built by the accessible VR prototype will later be carried out to distinguish the differences between accessible and non-accessible VR solutions.
Contact details: @visyon360, Pere Pérez Ninou, CEO
RIALTO, R2M Solution
🇮🇹 augmented RealIty snAg Listing Tool for cOnstruction
R2M Solution is an Italian research and innovation company. Their project IALTO focuses on the construction sector, targeting clash detection and defect management reporting during inspections and post-construction maintenance. R2M Solution aims to conceptualise and develop an AR-based snag listing tool. The project will in turn allow to add some practical features to improve information exchange and time efficiency, such as, automatic location and measurements through HMD cameras and sensors, automatic displaying information over objects, overlaying and comparing design models to as-built models and the voice entry capabilities.
Contact details: @R2MSolution, Rubén Alonso, ICT & Robotics Division Coordinator
WiP-VR, Queen Mary University of London
🇬🇧 Ergonomic walk-in-place interface for Locomotion in Virtual Reality
Due to the importance of natural interactive walking in virtual scenes in XR applications, QMUL employs robotics, haptics, and human biomechanics principles to provide intuitive walking gesture interface and sensation of realistic leg-virtual terrain interaction. Within this project, they will conduct a comprehensive user study and develop a user-friendly prototype of the interface suitable for VR-based gaming applications.
Contact details: @QMUL, Dr. Ildar Farkhatdinov, Lecturer
ACR, BECOME SRL
🇮🇹 Augmented Cognitive Rehabilitation VR App
Through the ACR, BECOME SRL intends to create a VR app to perform cognitive rehabilitation exercises or cognitive empowerment. This project will increase rehabilitation effectiveness by improving patients’ and doctors’ engagement thanks to its interactivity and expansive exercises. These exercises involve viewing or listening to different stimuli in natural immersive scenarios, within which the subject must select the stimuli required for each specific task by moving head or hands.
Contact details: @BecomeHub, Luca Bernardelli, CEO
DeepWAR, Cognitive Innovations Private Company
🇬🇷 Deep learning enabled Web AR application
WebAR provides access to AR through a web browser, while its embedded deep learning algorithms will power customised AR experiences for the future Web platform. DeepWAR will provide low level deep learning components implementation to the SoIAR platform using model compression and inference acceleration in order to process big data at maximum level for current web platforms.
Contact details: Dr. Fotis Foukalas, Technology Director
PREHUROCO, Institute for Computer Science and Control
🇭🇺 PREdictor of HUman RObot COllision
PREHUROCO is a B2B XR software package to prevent production interruptions for industrial system integrator companies. The objective is to develop a new interactive technology-based collision-avoidance software technology for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in various manufacturing assembly tasks. By enabling clients to avoid interruptions, the service saves time and improves profitability for clients in the manufacturing industry.
Contact details: Peter Kovacs, Head of the Shared Virtual Reality Group
NextPlant DT, Augmented Reality Software S.L.
🇪🇸 Digital Twin Visualizer, Maintenance Manuals and Training Simulators with Augmented and Virtual Reality
The NextPlant is a learning and support platform which empowers technical experts to improve information efficiency. This project aims to extend the platform’s usability in industrial domains by creating a XR Solution to integrate industrial IoT data from multiple DTs of different companies. Workers can visualise data and even connect to industrial plant’s machines to control remotely in an AR or VR environment.
Contact details: @ARSOFTCOMPANY