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.