13 January. 2023
The CYENS Centre of Excellence proudly announces the launch of
”XR4ED: Extended Reality for Education”, an EU-funded Innovation Action under Horizon Europe.
The project is coordinated by Prof. Fotis Liarokapis and his research group. XR4ED focuses on immersive technologies and brings together a diverse group of stakeholders working in the rapidly growing realm of Extended Reality.
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, and an open marketplace for Extended Reality (XR) applications, for learning, training, and education. Together, they will form a European reference platform dedicated to learning and teaching with XR.
The overall objective of the XR4ED project is to design, create and maintain a sustainable and on-demand education platform. This will mobilize the European EdTech and XR community and provide a central access point for solutions. The project will place Europe in a leading technological position while ensuring European values for privacy and ethics. The project will announce calls for funded participation in 2024.
Over the next three years, the consortium will design and implement the XR4ED platform. It will serve as a springboard for cultivating an ever-growing ecosystem of stakeholders interested in using and developing XR applications in all education sectors. CYENS will align participant efforts and offer an overview of the whole project, ensuring that all activities are integrated. 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.
The XR4ED platform will feature:
- 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: open-source 3D libraries, AR/3D data repositories, XR Accessibility resources, Open Educational Resources (OER) repositories that are available to use under CC (Creative Commons) licenses, and education-related repositories of the pilot countries
- A Marketspace for posting offers or requests for XR4ED-related services.
- 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
- Blog and Newsletter for updates on the latest tech and product innovation and project activities.
Additionally, through two rounds of open calls, each successful proposal will be awarded up to EUR 230K. The successful companies will get the opportunity to enhance the functionality and content of the XR4ED platform by improving existing or developing new tools for creating XR applications.
The XR4ED series of open calls will be announced in 2024. If you are interested in
further information and the
opportunity to collaborate, please get in touch with us at
xr4ed_eu@cyens.org.cy.