As metaverses operate in real-time their wide adoption is expected to create digital public spaces for interaction in which the already possible online interactions are intensified and blended with the physical world as never before. To lead in this field and maximize positive implications, Europe needs to ensure that new multi-dimensional challenges arising, are addressed in accordance with European values. AGORA responds to the lack of doctoral programs which go beyond the technical understanding of Metaverses and consider its business and social value while unpacking and addressing potential unintended consequences. Through a rigorous and robust research and training programme, AGORA aims to develop a critical research and talent base capable of leading by example. AGORA’s approach is to train the researchers not only to understand Metaverse's infrastructure but also to understand and oscillate between the different levels of Metaverse’s business and societal value, paving in this way a more integrated understanding of this disruptive ecosystem. Combining theoretical and hands-on industrial research and transferable skills training will enable researchers to target high-quality publication outlets and to become creative and autonomous so that they can exploit and commercialize research results and become competitive in the global arena. One of AGORA’s unique selling points is its ability to prepare the ESRs to work in any of the three pathways (academia, industry, policy making) as well as their intersections. AGORA's inter-sectoral network brings together leading academic and non-academic co-supervision arrangements of high quality, stimulates the development of new industrial doctoral training procedures between top business schools and industries in the region.

In the context of modern technologies, the transition to 6G networks faces numerous challenges; therefore, novel solutions must be discovered, combined, and tested in order to achieve distributed smart connectivity, imperceptible latency, virtually infinite capacity, improved security/privacy, smart/adaptive networking, and energy efficiency. The 6G-ICARUS project will investigate, combine, and improve on current technologies in order to address numerous obstacles that 6G networks will face in order to define the future wireless networks (FWNs). 6G-ICARUS is focused on FWNs capable of meeting a variety of targets, resulting in better geographic coverage, particularly in urban areas, higher transmission rates, lower latency, provision of diverse services, processing of information generated from a massive volume of heterogeneous sources, inherent resilience to counter potential security threats, and making intelligent decisions. 6G-ICARUS is founded on three pillars: (i) Effective utilisation of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces suitably controlled by artificial intelligence software; (ii) Channel modelling for mmWave/subTHz communications; (iii) Multi-connectivity solutions for 6G mobile communications. The project will generate novel research results as well as novel original hardware supported by innovative software (techniques, algorithms) based mostly on machine learning and deep learning. Hardware and software will be combined and examined in real-world settings to fulfill certain situations, all of which are matched with real-world applications. There will be separate Proof of Concept studies to validate the technologies and methodologies under consideration.

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 interactions 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 Immersive DeckⓇ platform, which will be further enhanced 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 the 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, we will carry out extensive and comprehensive studies to validate the proposed solution in the real world settings of two 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.

Given the inability of Highly-Distributed-Application-Developers to foresee the changes as well as the heterogeneity on the underlying infrastructure, it is considerable crucial the design and development of novel software paradigms that facilitate application developers to take advantage of the emerging programmability of the underlying infrastructure and therefore develop Reconfigurable-by-Design applications. In parallel, it is crucial to design solutions that are scalable, support high performance, are resilient-to-failure and take into account the conditions of their runtime environment. Towards this direction, the ARCADIA project aims to design and validate a Novel Reconfigurable-By-Design Highly Distributed Applications Development Paradigm over Programmable Infrastructure. The proposed framework will rely on the development of an extensible Context Model which will be used by developers directly at the source-code level. Proper Context-Model will be assisted and validated by IDE-plugins (for many IDEs) in order to re-assure that the generated executable files contain meaningful semantics. According to ARCADIA’s vision, the generated executables should be on-boarded by a Smart Controller which will undertake the tasks of translating annotations to optimal infrastructural configuration. Such a controller will enforce an optimal configuration to the registered programmable resources and will pro-actively adjust the configuration plan based on the Infrastructural State and the Application State. The Context-Model and the aforementioned ARCADIA toolset will be complemented by a Development Methodology that will assure that developed Highly Distributed Applications are Reconfigurable-By-Design. The framework is planned to be validated and evaluated on three use cases that will be deployed over testbeds that host heterogeneous programmable infrastructure.

XR2Learn will deliver the XR2Learn platform around which it establishes a cross-border innovation community for XR in learning, bringing XR technology providers, application designers, education experts, application developers, end-users and decision makers in direct access to communicate, collaborate and matchmake interests enabling also bottom up innovation creation. XR2Learn will go beyond offering sound technical and business support for the creation of XR applications for education: XR2Learn will provide access to authoring tools for development of applications through its platform, deliver tools for emotion/affect detection and for automated adaptation of the learning experience to the user needs and emotions, deliver guidance relevant to educational design and use case definition, provide opportunities for piloting and user testing mediated by the large networks brought by XR2Learn partners, promote tools that enable and boost the re-use and sharing of the learning materials/XR applications, offer business development support and additionally, support IPR management through NFTs enabling novel business model implementation. XR2Learn will support innovators (ICT-SMEs) all the way from ideation to commercialisation offering them tailored business and technical support as well as direct funding through FSTPs.