ORIGINS

Human connection in XR emerges from interrelated perceptual and cognitive ingredients: identity, expressivity, plausibility, and shared meaning, shaped by multiple modalities. Yet current systems rely on rigid avatars and scripted content, limiting nuance, emotion, and natural communication. Advancing these dimensions is essential to approach the XR ambition: to learn, collaborate, and create together in virtual worlds that feel safe, authentic, inclusive, and adaptive. ORIGINS will impact the quality of human experience in immersive virtual spaces by addressing three challenges: i) how to deliver AI-enhanced holoportation, improving RGB-D/point-cloud pipelines with real-time denoising, completion, and perceptual compression to preserve identity, facial dynamics, gesture, and gaze during multi-user volumetric communication; ii) how to achieve inclusive multimodal interaction, integrating speech, gesture, gaze, translation and accessible interfaces so experiences remain usable and trustworthy across abilities and languages iii) how to enable generative narrative worlds, where adaptive avatars, intelligent assistants, and context-aware content support co-created stories reflecting user goals, culture, and environment. ORIGINS will ensure uptake through a threefold evaluation approach: 1) each technology independently assessed with psychophysical and accessibility metrics; 2) integrated stacks iteratively validated to streamline APIs/SDKs and enable third-party reuse; 3) all components exercised in four immersive use cases (cultural heritage, educational training, virtual tourism, health & rehabilitation) following a human-centred design process and culminating in user-experience evaluations. By moving from scripted to generative, from isolated to shared, and from exclusive to inclusive XR, ORIGINS advances Europe’s leadership in trustworthy, human-centric Virtual Worlds.