ToHyVe

The changes in business communications triggered by the COVID 19 crisis will be lasting. Companies have learned that a large proportion of meetings can certainly be conducted online, saving a lot of travel and costs. These changes have additional positive effects in terms of climate protection. However, the procedures of telepresence and hybrid meeting formats still need to be significantly improved in order to generate broad acceptance and thus strengthen the sustainability of this development. For these reasons, the goal of the project is to develop a toolbox that can serve a variety of event formats - while taking privacy and security into account. In particular, this includes the following application scenarios:

1. Showroom tours: virtualizing showrooms so that they can be virtually walked through and experienced immersively.
2. Presentations: Physically present (analog) and online-connected (virtual) speakers should be able to give lectures that can be followed by analog and virtual viewers, with interactions between speaker and audience possible in any combination.
3. Mixed panel discussions: Analog and virtual panel members should be able to see and interact with each other, as well as be aware of the audience.
4. Workshops: Analog and virtual workshop participants sit together in a panel. Virtual participants are presented in such a way that all participants can see and interact with each other on an equal footing.
5. Networking: Analog and virtual participants should be able to talk to each other in a standing table situation. Virtual participants should have an equal networking experience as their analog counterparts.
6. Social Media: The integration of external contributions/social media shall enable the preparation and presentation of external contributions with technologies such as sentiment analysis, clustering/summary, ranking, match making.
7. Trade Show/Exhibit Presentations: Virtual trade show booths will be established where products or other exhibits (e.g., paintings, sculptures) are displayed and where exhibits are explained by people either through videos or the like or online, in mixed reality environments.
8. Conversational Concierge: Analog and virtual participants are welcomed by a text- and voice-based chatbot dialogue system. The chatbot summarizes what has happened so far, points out important topics and content, answers questions about the event and can be used during an event as well as for post-event use of the logged and annotated event.
9. Town Hall Meetings: Interactive presentations with audience involvement e.g. in questions/answers.

Partners

• Archimedes Exhibitions GmbH
• Deutsche Telekom AG – T-Labs
• Fraunhofer Institut für Integrierte Schaltungen
• Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
• nanocosmos GmbH
• mac. brand spaces GmbH
• iventic GmbH
• TriCAT GmbH