On October 20, 2022, eight of Europe’s most cutting-edge companies and universities in the field of telepresence applications officially kicked off the SPIRIT project.
Winner of the Horizon Europe call HORIZON-CL4-2021-HUMAN-01-25, SPIRIT is a European research and innovation project whose goal is to put into practice Europe’s first scalable platform for innovations on real-time immersive telepresence.
Motivation
Telepresence tools have shown in recent years how they can improve human interactions when our friends, family, colleagues, or classmates are not nearby. However, the potential of these applications is far-reaching.
Telepresence is the next generation of communication applications that, by blurring the physical and virtual worlds, will significantly improve immersive experiences in both human-to-human and human-to-machine interactions. While this is already having an impact on how we work, it will have an even greater impact in the future, contributing to increased adaptation to the effects of climate change, lowering CO2 emissions, and improving industry productivity and energy efficiency.
These solutions have not yet been scaled due to their complexity, cost, data compression, and bandwidth requirements. The SPIRIT project will implement a clear strategy to overcome these obstacles by researching, developing, and demonstrating low-latency and scalable solutions. This innovation journey will eventually lead to the creation of Europe’s first multi-site and interconnected framework capable of supporting a wide range of application features in collaborative telepresence.
Who is on board
SPIRIT brings together eight partners from top industry organisations, SMEs, leading universities, and research centres in network communications and immersive technologies. The partners, led by imec, include Ericsson, Deutsche Telekom, Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, AWTG, Digital for Planet, the University of Klagenfurt, and the University of Surrey and will work together for the next 36 months. More information about the consortium is available here.
With all members highly motivated, SPIRIT is now looking forward to contributing to advancing extended collaborative telepresence technologies and increasing European competitiveness and innovation capacity. Find out more about the project here and follow its activities on Twitter and LinkedIn.
