At Youbiquo, we are launching Hologlass, a new generation of Augmented Reality smart glasses to several B2B enterprise markets. Since our inception, we have been working on creating AR smart glasses to assist and support maintenance and logistics technicians in their work as well as museums in providing an immersive visitor experience. Industrial technicians who work on assembling, testing and maintaining equipment cannot work handsfree as they need to consult manuals, call experts and make photos. To help them boost their productivity, safety and efficiency, smart glasses are expected to be sold - we have a serviceable available market of €1.4bn by 2022. Whilst our competition is focusing on the smart glass consumer market and just started targeting the enterprise market, we have been working on smart glasses for the workforce for the past four years. We have the potential to be the one European SME to become a relevant player in the AR smart glasses arena. Our technology stands out due to the thin lightweight lens that is half as thick as our best competitors’ that allows for a wider field of vision. Our technology can be bought off-the-shelf or be customized. To capture the 3D element, we only need one single camera – as opposed to our competition that needs two – because we capture the 3D dimension through hand movement tracking. The Phase 1 funding will help us fund the feasibility activities to prepare for a Phase 2 project when we will boost our current TRL6 prototype to a final marketable product. We will continue with our customer development process and prepare to trial the production Phase 2 with several companies, some of which have already expressed their interest. Our company started by four professionals active in ICT, electronic and marketing sectors. Young talents and expert managers joined the team to bring a solid technical background in mechanical design, software design and development, and hardware design of devices. We are now a team of 12.

DARLENE aims to investigate means by which AR can be deployed in real time to aid in LEA decision-making by employing AR capabilities and combining them with powerful ML algorithms, sensor information fusion techniques, 3D reconstruction, wearable technology and personalized context-aware recommendations. Hence DARLENE will offer European LEAs a proactive security solution which will provide an IoT level of Situational Awareness, detection and recognition, combining cutting edge technology and public security in all security verticals. It will enable LEAs to reduce and prevent crime, and to more quickly respond to crimes already in progress, by enabling them to sort through massive volumes of data to predict, anticipate and prevent criminal activities, make better informed tactical decisions and provide enhanced protection services for European citizens. DARLENE will therefore develop practical and beneficial policing applications through the use of affordable, light-weight and inconspicuous AR glasses. Such applications will capitalize on cutting edge research that will combine with AR Technology to create innovative methods for combating crime and even terrorist acts. To align technology development with actual security needs and requirements, DARLENE will build a community of LEAs organization and security stakeholders that will guide the development process and evaluate the entire DARLENE ecosystem. In this regard, DARLENE foresees extensive demonstration and training activities for LEAs while the entire solution will be demonstrated and validated in realistic scenarios during the pilot phase of the project, thus paving the way to its field deployment and commercial uptake.

New strategic and growing markets related to connectivity, mobility, automotive, health and earth monitoring call for improved imaging solutions in visible, LWIR and VLWIR offering advanced functionalities and cost effectiveness. Visible imagers market is currently largely dominated by non-European countries. LWIR µbolometers imagers, fabricated above-IC, have not yet been democratized for high volume markets due to the difficulty to solve performance versus cost equation. However, Asian providers are making important progress to tackle this challenge. ATHENA aims at strengthening European economy in high-tech imaging technologies: - by taking advantage of 3D stacking technologies, improved sensor-processing integration, multimodal 2D/3D functionalities - by preparing the manufacturing of µbolometers from 200mm to 300mm CMOS wafers for productivity gain and access to more advanced CMOS nodes for improved functionalities, developing cost effective LWIR wafer level optic solutions - by using new methods of growing and doping materials for future VLWIR imager manufacturability. This will foster new applications related to automated systems (in industry, border and security management), health and consumer markets, and earth & climate monitoring. ATHENA gathers a strong European consortium composed of highly renowned Research Technological Organizations, big industrial players in imaging technologies and end-users to specify, design, develop, test these technologies in use cases and set common specifications for the imagers to support their industrialization and widespread adoption. In line with both the European Union’s Chips Act and the Electronics, Components and Systems Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, ATHENA will not only address the development of new sensors and chips, but also their integration in larger systems to pave the way to promising applications. ATHENA will strongly contribute to Europe leadership, industrial competitiveness and sovereignty.

5G is considered to be the next decade mainstream broadband wireless technology and can leverage the efficiency and effectiveness of everyday high demanding operations such as public protection and disaster relief (PPDR). ITU considers LTE-Advanced systems and 5G as a mission critical PPDR technology able to address the needs of mission critical intelligence by supporting mission critical voice, data and video services as an IMT radio interface. 5G-EPICENTRE will deliver an open end-to-end experimentation 5G platform focusing on software solutions that serve the needs of PPDR. The envisioned platform will enable SMEs and developers to acquire knowledge with regard to the latest 5G applications and approaches for first responders and crisis management, as well as to build up and experiment with their solutions. The 5G-EPICENTRE platform will be based on an open Service oriented Architecture, following the current best DevOps practices (containerization of micro-services) and will be able to accommodate and provide open access to 5G networks’ resources, acting this way as a 5G open source repository for PPDR Network Applications. For the assessment of the abovementioned platform, the realization of several use cases is being foreseen which will be realized as a PPDR vertical. The purpose of the use cases is to expand along the entire range of the 3 ITU-defined service types (i.e. eMBB, mMTC and URLLC) as well as to provide the floor for overseeing the platform’s secure interoperability capabilities beyond vendor-specific implementation. The engaged SMEs and organizations that will participate into the realization of the use cases constitute active players in the public security and disaster management, thus acting as key enablers for the assessment of 5G-EPICENTRE with regard to the real needs that should be addressed. Finally, through the use cases realization, KPIs relevant to 5G will be measured, especially those that are pertain to services’ creation time.

XR has the potential to revolutionize various industrial sectors by offering more engaging, secure, and inclusive training and assistance for complex tasks thus enabling more people to acquire the skills required to perform such tasks. However, the creation of such XR experiences is still overly complex, time consuming, and expensive thus blocking their wide adoption in industrial sectors that do not have the necessary expertise nor the resources to create and deploy them. The main objective of MOTIVATE XR is to create a world’s leading XR collaborative authoring, publishing, and experiencing tool suite for training and assistance to industrial operations such as the assembly, manufacturing, maintenance, and dismantlement, of industrial goods. This ground-breaking, open, tightly integrated, and highly interoperable solution will be designed for, and usable by a wide range of users without programming skills, from the largest European industrials to handywomen/handymen, without requiring software development skills. It will offer an end-to-end solution to streamline the whole authoring and experiencing workflow thanks to novel portable 3D scanning and digital twin modelling solutions, No-Code authoring approaches and ground-breaking XR experiencing tools, including a next-gen European XR smart headset, all assisted by the latest advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It will then evaluate its result in five complementary and ambitious pilots in different industrial sectors including aerospace, home appliance, aluminium, electric distribution, and hybrid human-robot industries. For this purpose, our project will involve a complementary group of the best-in-class European experts and leading industries adopting a user-centric methodology coordinated by an SSH expert to ensure proper consideration of societal, ethical, and legal issues and ethical use of XR and AI technologies.