The DIDMYOS -XR consortium met in person on 13-15 September May 2023 for its 3rd Consortium Meeting. The project partners gathered in Patras, Greece, where we were hosted by the University of Patras project partner. The primary aim of this latest consortium meeting was to define the user requirements as they related to the project use cases, evaluate use case workflows within the different work packages, and discuss how to exploit our results in future. All in all, it was an extremely useful meeting with a great group of people!
The first day started with HSHL revisiting the project use cases, and facilitating a discussion about the technologies and architectures each use case will require. Then, in the afternoon, HSHL again led a discussion about defining and understanding the user requirements they had identified from workshops with stakeholders, survey responses, and discussions with other partners. Through this, HSHL will be able to begin to create the methodology needed to validate the technologies.
The cityscape use case will include applications for tourism, urban planning and smart mobility. The digital twins will be based on the two towns Etteln in Germany and Vilanova i la Geltrú in Spain, where our use case partners, FIWARE and Neapolis respectively, will be coordinating the efforts to capture the town. The XR applications would be able to show real-time information from various sensors displayed on the digital twin city and in return support making sustainable and environmentally friendly decisions.
The industrial use case aims to validate the digital twin technology by introducing human-in-the-loop mapping of the facilities, making the process more cost-effective and safer for workers. This use case is coordinated by idealworks whose autonomous robots would work alongside employees to create a digital twin of the large-scale production facilities for a more accurate representation of the environment necessary for all other autonomous robots used now or in the future.
DIDYMOS-XR wants to ensure the technology we create adds value to society and that is why project partner TRI leads the impact assessment task already at an early stage to ensure ethical and societal considerations are incorporated by design. The first day of the meeting ended with planning the first engagements with the project’s external advisory boards and stakeholders to understand their requirements.
On the second day of the meeting, the technical partners led a discussion focusing on the more technical aspects of the use cases and digital twins. The topics covered consisted of how to capture the environment, understand the scene from the different types of sensors, localising it to the user and putting that together into an XR application that can still be run on portable devices, such as phones or headsets. Current digital twin technology is expensive and requires a lot of computing power to show information in real-time – the aim of the project is to make that more accessible and cost-efficient. The discussion, led by i2CAT and the University of Patras, centred around understanding the challenges of integrating each aspect of the digital model and making them capable of interacting and building on one another.
The last day of the meeting involved discussions of exploitation of the results of the project, and how the project could contribute to Standardization methods for digital twin technologies. This discussion was led by the WP6 lead, DTT. We also discussed the dissemination and communication strategy to ensure project results are received by the widest audience possible and we maximise the impact of our research findings.
Overall, the consortium meeting was very productive and left us with a clear understanding of how to move forward with both defining the user requirements and how to begin aligning the different technologies. We look forward to a busy next couple of months as we aim to begin developing a validation methodology. If you wish to be involved or know more about the project please sign up for our newsletter or follow us on our LinkedIn/ Twitter for regular updates.
By Maj Ruess
