BRIDGES project
BRIDGES aims to support and boost the pan-European interactive technologies industry and contribute to “bridging” the gap between interactive technologies and industry, through the development of a holistic solution for (remote and co-located) group interaction in room-scale immersive mixed reality (or eXtended Reality – XR) environments that blend the physical and virtual space. The BRIDGES solution is based on an existing platform, the Immersive Deck, which will be further researched and developed into a turn-key product with widespread applicability that may act as a stimulus for the uptake of interactive technologies by industry.
BRIDGES will focus on the areas of training and informal learning, culture, and entertainment, as it is widely recognized that immersive XR is an extremely promising tool for the enhancement of a user’s experience in these areas, and an optimal medium for achieving enhanced performance, engagement, a high level of effectiveness, and the transfer of skills and knowledge into the real world. To ensure widespread uptake, within BRIDGES, we will be carrying out extensive and comprehensive studies to validate the proposed solution “in-the-wild”, i.e. in the real world settings of major international airports in Germany and Greece for training firefighters and first responders, and in a highly visited informal educational and cultural center – museum in Greece, for enhancing the learning and recreational experience of visitors. The extensive validation effort undertaken by BRIDGES is expected to lead to the short-term commercial deployment of the BRIDGES end-results in the specific domains addressed by the project pilots, but also to provide replicability recommendations and scale-up guidelines for deploying the resulting XR platform in other industrial and entertainment domains, in the longer term.