Transforming European Industrial Ecosystems through eXtended Reality enhanced with human-centric AI and secure, 5G-enabled IoT

It is a bit ironic that when Joseph von Fraunhofer did his seminal work on optics laying the foundations of XR over two centuries ago, his work was kept as a state secret, yet nowadays all major industrial XR players are non-European. Despite the solid scientific base of European organizations and companies in XR and related fields, the European XR industry has seen limited success mainly due to heavy market fragmentation, lack of investment and a difficulty in commercializing applied research.Acknowledging this, INDUX-R envisions a human-centric XR ecosystem that will transform European industrial sectors by empowering humans and creating innovate XR products and services of significant added value. It targets for concrete scientific breakthroughs integrated in technological enablers that will be applied in use cases driven from real-life needs while having the potential to be replicated in several other applications. These breakthroughs are focused on core XR technologies, namely, digitisation and creation of XR assets, realistic animation, light-field HMDs, XR media streaming and egocentric perception. To address challenges that multi-user XR applications pose, INDUX-R will implement a highly scalable, zero-touch 5G architecture and a secure, interoperable IoT network that can accommodate fluctuating demands and minimize waste of resources.The foreseen use cases cover a wide spectrum of industrial ecosystems in event planning, Industry 4.0, virtual medical training, cultural tourism, and broadcasting of sports events where end-users will participate in every step of INDUX-R, from the elaboration of user requirements up to final qualification of the ecosystem, thus implementing a human-centric approach of XR technology development. In this regard, INDUX-R reflects upon the societal and ethical challenges that XR poses, building a legal and ethics framework that will ensure that technological development is aligned with European values.