INESC ID leads European project on the use of AI for testing advanced interactive software systems as part of the H2020
The project, called iv4XR (Intelligent
Verification/Validation for Extended Reality Based Systems), is led by INESC ID
and will be developed by a European consortium, as part of the H2020 programme.
Project iv4XR will develop
groundbreaking verification and validation technology for Extended
Reality (XR) systems based on techniques from AI to provide learning and
reasoning over a virtual world. With this technology XR developers can deploy
powerful test agents to automatically explore and test the correctness of a
virtual world as they iteratively develop and refine it. This includes testing
user experience using socio-emotional AI. The project results will enable
developers to conduct automated assessment of the quality of user experience,
parameterized by different target groups of users, and different user
experience goals.
Nowadays, Extended Reality (XR) systems (e.g. advanced interactive systems, such as, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)) have emerged in various domains, ranging from entertainment, cultural heritage, to combat training and mission critical applications. The development and authoring of such systems is an iterative process that also includes quality assurance to make sure that the resulting systems are correct and delivering a high quality user experience. As the complexity of these systems keeps increasing, the XR industry now finds itself confronting a soaring engineering challenge: paradoxically, XR’s fine grained and high level of interactivity and realism make such systems very hard and expensive to test. The current XR authoring and development toolset poses no XR testing technology beyond rudimentary record and replay tools
that only work for simple test scenarios. The iv4XR project will address this difficult challenge.
This project will be carried out by a team consisting
of four companies (large and SMEs) representing the XR industry, three
universities, and two research institutes. The team combines decades of
expertise in advanced interactive systems, AI, and software engineering.
Consortium includes
9 organizations from eight different nationalities
Besides INESC ID, there are eight other partners, from seven different nationalities (Spanish, Italian, Dutch, English, French, Czech, and Swedish), involved in the project: UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT (The Netherlands), FONDAZIONE BRUNO KESSLER (Italy), JUNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE VALENCIA (Spain), GAMEWARE EUROPE LIMITED (UK), AGI RESEARCH SRO (Czech Republic),THALES SIX GTS FRANCE SAS (France), THALES AVS FRANCE SAS (France) and UMEA UNIVERSITET (Sweden).
INESC ID is represented in this project by the GAIPS –
Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group, which will be responsible
for implementing this project. Rui Prada, as project leader, highlights the
expected growth of the field and market of XR systems in gaming, training and
operational domains. He argues that AI will have an important contribution in
the development of complex XR systems and will be crucial to support the new
emerging uses of XR.
Project iv4XR is scheduled to start in October 2019,
has a duration of 36 months and will be receiving an investment of
approximately 3.7 million euros.
