| Project Detail |
Enriching social interaction in shared hybrid spaces
Extended reality (XR) is an emerging technology with promising potential in many areas, but several limitations must be overcome to enrich the interactive experience for users. The EU-funded SHARESPACE project aims to establish a novel prototype for a socially interactive avatar and/or agent based on human sensorimotor communication. It will capture natural body movements, facial expressions and hand gestures to compile an array of sensorimotor primitives: these will aid the design of AI-based architecture of a fully mobile human rendering with customisable characteristics. SHARESPACE will validate the prototype in three real-life situations of shared hybrid spaces involving human and artificial agents in the fields of health, sport and art.
SHARESHARESPACE will demonstrate a radically new technology for promoting ethical and social interaction in eXtended Reality (XR) Shared Hybrid Spaces (SHS), anchored in human sensorimotor communication. Our core concept is to identify and segment social sensorimotor primitives and reconstruct them in hybrid settings to build continuous, embodied, and rich human- avatar experiences. To achieve this, three interconnected science-towards-technology breakthroughs will be delivered: novel computational cognitive architectures, a unique self-calibrating body sensor network, and a fully mobile spatial Augmented Reality (AR) and virtual human rendering. We will create a library of social motion primitives and use them to design AI-based architectures of our artificial agents. SHARESPACE mobile capturing technologies combine loosely-coupled visual-inertial tracking of full body kinematic, hand pose and facial expression, incorporating novel neural encoding/decoding functionalities, together with local context-aware animations and highly realistic neural rendering. Our technology will be iteratively tested in 2 Proofs-of-principles involving human and artificial agents interacting in SHS, and 3 real-world use case scenarios in Health, Sport and Art. We will demonstrate a fully functional prototype of SHARESPACE tailored to the agents’ personalized characteristics (gender, culture, and social dispositions). SHARESPACE will support community-building and exploitation with concrete initiatives, including (i) public engagement around our research and innovation, (ii) promoting high-tech innovation and early transfer to our deep-tech companies, as premises for the consolidation of human-centric and sovereign European market areas such Industry AR and SHS, eHealth and tele-Health. Our long-term vision is to bring XR to a radically new level of presence and sociality by reconstructing sensorimotor primitives that enable ethical, trusted and inclusive modes of social interaction. |
