The consortium of CORTEX2 — “COoperative Real-Time EXperiences with EXtended reality” — is proud to announce the official start of this European initiative, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme.
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed individuals and companies worldwide to work primarily from home or completely change their work model in order to stay in business. The share of employees who usually or sometimes work from home rose from 14.6% to 24.4% between 2019 and 2021. In Europe, the proportion of people who work remotely went from 5% to 40% as a result of the pandemic. Today, all the signs are that remote work is here to stay: 72% of employees say their organization is planning some form of permanent teleworking in the future, and 97% would like to work remotely, at least part of their working day, for the rest of their career. But not all organizations are ready to adapt to this new reality, where team collaboration is vital.
Existing services and applications aimed at facilitating remote team collaboration — from video conferencing systems to project management platforms — are not yet ready to efficiently and effectively support all types of activities. And extended reality (XR)-based tools, which can enhance remote collaboration and communication, present significant challenges for most businesses.
The mission of CORTEX2 is to democratize access to the remote collaboration offered by next-generation XR experiences across a wide range of industries and SMEs.
To this aim, CORTEX2 will provide:
- Full support for AR experience as an extension of video conferencing systems when using heterogeneous service end devices through a novel Mediation Gateway platform. - Resource-efficient teleconferencing tools through innovative transmission methods and automatic summarization of shared long documents. - Easy-to-use and powerful XR experiences with instant 3D reconstruction of environments and objects, and simplified use of natural gestures in collaborative meetings. - Fusion of vision and audio for multichannel semantic interpretation and enhanced tools such as virtual conversational agents and automatic meeting summarization. - Full integration of internet of things (IoT) devices into XR experiences to optimize interaction with running systems and processes. - Optimal extension possibilities and broad adoption by delivering the core system with open APIs and launching open calls to enable further technical extensions, more comprehensive use cases, and deeper evaluation and assessment.
Overall, we will invest a total of 4 million Euros in two open calls, which will be aimed at recruiting tech startups/SMEs to co-develop CORTEX2; engaging new use-cases from different domains to demonstrate CORTEX2 replication through specific integration paths; assessing and validating the social impact associated with XR technology adoption in internal and external use cases.
The first one will be published on October 2023 with the aim to collect two types of applications: Co-development and Use-case. The second one will be published on April 2024, targeting only Co-development type projects.
The CORTEX2 consortium is formed by 10 organizations in 7 countries, which will work together for 36 months. The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) leads the consortium.
More information on the Project Website: https://cortex2.eu
Partners
- - DFKI – Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH Germany 2 - LINAGORA – GSO France 3 - ALE – Alcatel-Lucent Entreprise International France 4 - ICOM – Intracom SA Telecom Solutions Greece 5 - AUS – AUSTRALO Alpha Lab MTÜ Estonia 6 - F6S – F6S Network Limited Ireland 7 - KUL– Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Belgium 8 - CEA – Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives France 9 - ACT – Actimage GmbH Germany 10 - UJI - Universitat Jaume I De Castellon
