The CYENS Centre of Excellence announced on Thursday the launch of the XR4ED Extended Reality for Education project, an EU-funded Innovation Action under Horizon Europe.
According to the Centre, the project, coordinated by Professor Fotis Liarokapis and his research group, focuses on immersive technologies and brings together a diverse group of stakeholders working in the rapidly growing realm of Extended Reality.
It is added that with a total budget of EUR 7,664,154 million, CYENS, together with one Cypriot organization and nine European institutions from France, Spain, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxemburg, and Romania, will develop a one-stop-shop, an open marketplace for Extended Reality (XR) applications for learning, training, and education, forming a European reference platform dedicated to learning and teaching with XR.
According to the statement, the overall objective of the XR4ED project is to design, create and maintain a sustainable and on-demand education platform, which will mobilize the European EdTech and XR community, provide a central access point for solutions and will place Europe in a leading technological position while ensuring European values for privacy and ethics.
CYENS adds that the project will announce calls for funded participation in 2024 and over the next three years the consortium will design and implement the XR4ED platform, serving as a springboard for cultivating an ever-growing ecosystem of stakeholders interested in using and developing XR applications in all education sectors.
Moreover, it is noted that the Centre will align participant efforts and offer an overview of the whole project, ensuring that all activities are integrated, while the end results will be featured on the XR4ED platform as tools and assets that researchers, application developers, educational institutions, and other XR stakeholders will be able to benefit from.
As stated, the XR4ED platform will feature a Development and Operations (DevOps) environment for the creation and distribution of innovative XR4ED applications, XR Software Development Kits (SDKs), build tools (like game engines) and content creation/management tools, an assets library that will collect all the artifacts produced by EU and national-funded research projects in the field of XR applications for education, as well as a marketspace for posting offers or requests for XR4ED-related services,
It will also include an ethics observatory common space for reflecting on privacy, ethics, and inclusiveness, with links to third-party articles and to reports created by the project working group on privacy, ethics and inclusiveness of XR EdTech, as well as a blog and a newsletter for updates on the latest tech and product innovation and project activities.
Open calls for the XR4ED project will be announced in 2024 and interested parties are invited to contact xr4ed_eu@cyens.org.cy for more information and collaboration opportunities, the statement concludes.
Source: Cyprus News Agency