Special Sessions
EUROPEAN PROJECTS
Luminous: Capturing, Describing And Extending Reality Using Language Modeling
CORTEX2: Cooperation made easy with extended reality
A human-centred and ethical development of digital and industrial technologies
SPIRIT - Scalable Platform for Innovations on Real-time Immersive Telepresence
THEIA-XR: Making the invisible visible for off-highway machinery by conveying eXtended Reality technologies
Social and hUma, ceNtered XR
Extended Collaborative Telepresence – How CORTEX² and SPIRIT are Advancing Innovation in XR
Shared Session
Discover the groundbreaking European-funded projects that are transforming the XR landscape and actively contributing to the EuroXR 2025 conference. Initiatives such as CORTEX² and SPIRIT are part of a vibrant ecosystem of research and innovation supported by the European Commission. These projects aim to drive technological advancement, support SMEs, and promote collaboration across the XR community.
Further information on their planned contributions to the official EuroXR 2025 conference programme will be made available in due course.
CORTEX² - Cooperative Real-Time EXperienceswith EXtended reality
Funding: Horizon Europe
Duration: 2022–2025
Website: https://cortex2.eu
Coordinator: Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI), Germany
Summary:
CORTEX² is a European R&D project aimed at building an integrated XR platform that enables seamless collaboration across Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) environments. The project targets industrial use cases, such as remote maintenance, training, and digital twin applications, by making XR more accessible, secure, and interoperable.
Key Objectives:
Developing an open digital XR workplace that enables seamless, cross-device collaboration.
Minimizing environmental impact with efficient teleconferencing and smart content summarization.
Improving user experience through intuitive interfaces, real-time 3D modeling, and gesture recognition.
Integrating semantic audio-visual tools to enhance understanding and meeting documentation.
Combining XR with IoT data to enrich virtual interactions with contextual AR overlays.
Addressing ethical, legal, and social issues to ensure responsible XR deployment in the workplace.
Cascade Projects:
CORTEX² funded 29 third-party XR innovation projects through its open call, supporting SMEs and research teams across Europe.
SPIRIT - Scalable Platform for Innovations on Real-time Immersive Telepresence
Funding: Horizon Europe
Duration: 2022–2025
Website: https://spirit-project.eu
Coordinator: imec, Belgium
Summary:
Immersive technologies are changing the way we live and work as the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds become more blurred. SPIRIT’s mission is to create Europe’s first multisite and interconnected framework capable of supporting a wide range of application features in collaborative telepresence.
Key Objectives:
Support a wide range of networking bandwidth with adequate compression transmission of information.
Overcome the limitations of the current technologies handling a large number of simultaneous users.
Support different input and output modalities as the bandwidth capacities extend.
Through open standards, support the integration of additional services.
Ensure security and protect user privacy as well as implement innovative identity management solutions.
Develop, document and promote open standards-based interfaces (such as APIs).
Provide systems to facilitate human-to-human and human-to-machine interaction.
Demonstrate clear and efficient integration paths for take-up by European industries.
Cascade Projects:
SPIRIT funded a total of 27 projects spanning a wide range of vertical sectors, including manufacturing, education, entertainment, and healthcare, through two open calls to validate and test their applications on the SPIRIT platform.
Workshops
"Co-creating in Virtual Worlds"
A human-centred and ethical development of digital and industrial technologies
DAY 1 - 3 September 14:30 - 18:00
This workshop is organised within the framework of the OpenVerse project , a Horizon Europe Coordination and Support Action (CSA) funded under the call HORIZON-CL4-2023-HUMAN-01-CNECT. Running from November 2023 to October 2026, OpenVerse aims to elevate the European Union’s landscape in Virtual Worlds by promoting co-creation, inclusivity, and interoperability in response to global tech competition and the pursuit of technological sovereignty.
About the Workshop
This 180-minute workshop explores how co-creation can serve as a catalyst for innovation within Virtual Worlds. Designed as a highly interactive and structured session, it invites participants to apply collaborative design tools and methods to envision novel services, applications, and interaction models across selected immersive platforms
The workshop opens with a brief introduction to current opportunities and challenges in the field, emphasising how human-centric, co-creation methodologies can shape more inclusive and interoperable digital environments. Participants will then engage in a hands-on co-creation exercise, working in small groups to ideate and prototype early-stage solutions to targeted innovation challenges. The session concludes with an interactive Q&A and reflection segment, providing a platform for participants to exchange insights and consider how workshop outcomes can translate into actionable strategies within their own sectors.
Benefit: Participants will gain hands-on experience with innovative tools and collaborative methods, enabling them to apply co-creation techniques in their own projects and organiasations.
Disclaimer: Participants Should be users of Virtual Worlds.
"Co-creating in Virtual Worlds"
"Preserving Ethics and Privacy in the Dawn of Industrial eXtended Reality"
DAY 2 - 4 September 14:30 - 16:00
THEIA-XR: Making the invisible visible for off-highway machinery by conveying eXtended Reality technologies
HORIZON-CL4-2022-HUMAN-01-14 - eXtended Reality Technologies (RIA)
"Next Generation Avatars in Real and Virtual Environments"
DAY 1 - 3 September 16:30 - 18:00
LUMINOUS: Language Augmentation for Humanverse
About the Workshop
One of the main challenges faced by the industry in the frames of new industrial transformation is the integration of new coming technologies, like Extended Reality (XR), into the existing working processes. While studies show that XR can create a huge positive impact on different industrial processes, like workplace education, work-related scenario developments, and support of existing working processes (e.g. teleoperations), it is still unclear what could be the main guiding lines to assure that these technologies do not create detrimental effects on workers’ lives and safety.
The knowledge from other domains of XR elements integration (like gaming applications or collaborative virtual spaces) presents an alarming picture of different potential ethical risks, from manipulation of people’s choices to mass surveillance and unjustified data gathering by XR devices. Plus, the exact nature of the industrial workplace can provide additional challenges related to potential workers' overreliance on technologies, or organizational power asymmetry, which affects workers’ data privacy.
To develop the XR-powered industrial workplace, we need to be sure that these and other potential challenges are taken into account in the earliest stages of design and properly addressed at each stage of implementation.
The presented workshop aimed to discuss the topic of ethical development of XR technologies in the industrial workplace. The participants are welcomed to share their considerations and ideas on how to put ethics into the development process. Through collaborative work and co-design, we aim to synthesize our common knowledge and experience and provide a roadmap for the next steps in the discussion around ethical industrial XR.
Projects Sessions
SUN Project Session:
XR for patient rehabilitation and safety at work. Project Highlights"
Social and hUma, ceNtered XR
HORIZON-CL4-2022-HUMAN-01-14 - eXtended Reality Technologies (RIA)
