COPA EUROPE aims to address the exploding demand for non-linear sports consumption (live and eSports) by leveraging OTT and combining it with new set of media technologies that will democratise the consumer experience, enable cost-sensitive live video from anywhere, and personalize the distribution to change the experience of each viewer individually. COPA EUROPE will deliver a cloud-based infrastructure for harvesting, accommodating, transmitting and distributing digital media with regard to sport and competitive events, including the infrastructure needed to allow content creators and producers of live coverage to react to live outcomes, via innovative workflows. COPA EUROPE vision is founded on four main pillars, ripe with potential for future media industry innovation: Media AI, which implements a secure recommender system fuelled by FL, specifically tailored to support the launching of personalized OTT channels, incorporating a variety of data (video, audio, statistical data etc.) harmoniously blended with commercial offerings in order to provide an enriched experience, to promote the personalisation of the provided services. Transmedia Storytelling, which aims to aid both connected subscribers and media professionals in indexing, searching, navigating, synchronizing and editing compelling productions from heterogeneous media sources and a variety of social media channels. Semi professional cloud-based live content workflow, from live video contribution and transmission from anywhere, through basic tools for semi-professional content production leveraging on context-tailored transcoding and bonding transmission using multiple 5G links, and/or 4G together, to ensure reliability, video continuity, high resolution and user experience. Blockchain, which provides support for P2P network infrastructure necessary to deliver an efficient smart contract transaction ecosystem, and subsequently deliver a decentralized live stream to individual paying subscribers.

It is a bit ironic that when Joseph von Fraunhofer did his seminal work on optics laying the foundations of XR over two centuries ago, his work was kept as a state secret, yet nowadays all major industrial XR players are non-European. Despite the solid scientific base of European organizations and companies in XR and related fields, the European XR industry has seen limited success mainly due to heavy market fragmentation, lack of investment and a difficulty in commercializing applied research. Acknowledging this, INDUX-R envisions a human-centric XR ecosystem that will transform European industrial sectors by empowering humans and creating innovate XR products and services of significant added value. It targets for concrete scientific breakthroughs integrated in technological enablers that will be applied in use cases driven from real-life needs while having the potential to be replicated in several other applications. These breakthroughs are focused on core XR technologies, namely, digitisation and creation of XR assets, realistic animation, light-field HMDs, XR media streaming and egocentric perception. To address challenges that multi-user XR applications pose, INDUX-R will implement a highly scalable, zero-touch 5G architecture and a secure, interoperable IoT network that can accommodate fluctuating demands and minimize waste of resources. The foreseen use cases cover a wide spectrum of industrial ecosystems in event planning, Industry 4.0, virtual medical training, cultural tourism, and broadcasting of sports events where end-users will participate in every step of INDUX-R, from the elaboration of user requirements up to final qualification of the ecosystem, thus implementing a human-centric approach of XR technology development. In this regard, INDUX-R reflects upon the societal and ethical challenges that XR poses, building a legal and ethics framework that will ensure that technological development is aligned with European values.

6G networks, currently only existing as concepts, are envisioned as portals to a fully digitized society, where the physical and virtual world are blended via boundless Extended Reality (XR), and also as an enabler for the Digital and Green transformation of the European Industries. To support this vision, the network capacity must be increased at least by an order of magnitude, while infrastructures must be transformed into a very dense continuum. Thus, academia and industry have shifted their attention to the investigation of a new generation of Smart Networks and infrastructures. It is clear that to win this race towards shaping the next-generation communication ecosystem, a new generation of testbed infrastructures and breakthrough research and technology development is needed needed, as well as a new generation of testbeds to support future research initiative. To this end, 6G-BRICKS aims to deliver a new 6G facility, building on the baseline of mature ICT-52 platforms, that bring breakthrough cell-free and RIS technologies that have shown promise for beyond 5G networks. Moreover, novel unified control paradigms based on Explainable AI and Machine Reasoning are explored. All enablers will be delivered in the form of reusable components with open APIs, termed “bricks“. Finally, initial integrations with O-RAN are performed, aiming for the future-proofing and interoperability of 6G-BRICKS outcomes.

5GMed5GMediaHUB aims to help EU to achieve the goal of becoming a world leader in 5G, by accelerating the testing and validation of innovative 5G-empowered media applications and NetApps from 3rd party experimenters and NetApps developers, through an open, integrated and fully featured Experimentation Facility. This will significantly reduce not only the service creation lifecycle but also the time to market barrier, thus providing such actors that are primarily from SMEs, with a competitive advantage against their rivals outside EU. In particular, 5GMediaHUB will build and operate an elastic, secure and trusted multi-tenant service execution and NetApps development environment based on an open cloud-based architecture and APIs, by developing and integrating a testing and validation system with two existing well-established 5G testbeds (by CTTC and Telenor) for enabling the fast prototyping, testing and validation of novel 5G services and NetApps. 5GMediaHUB will offer: (i) a DevOps environment for Testing as a Service; (ii) a rich set of Experimentation Tools that offer scheduling, validation, verification, analytics and QoS/QoE monitoring mechanisms; (iii) A set of re-usable vertical-specific and vertical-agnostic NetApps with easy to use APIs that can be consumed by application developers, reducing the complexity and risk of integrations and operations; (iv) a re-usable open-source NetApps Repository; (v) an umbrella cross-domain service orchestrator to deliver cross-domain orchestration of NetApps; (vi) an innovative security framework offering software defined perimeter protection and isolation of NetApps; (vii) incremental validation capabilities of the Experimental Facility evidenced through 3 novel media use cases with 2 scenarios each, over 3GPP R.16 and R.17 5G testbed releases. Our 17-partner consortium (9 SMEs) from 9 countries has extremely rich 5G-PPP experience, since 13 partners have participated in previous 5G-PPP projects and in several 5G-PPP WGs.

Long-term towards Evolved 5G and 6G research needs mobilization of massive volumes of ideas, from which the best can emerge and be taken into standardization. It is the convergence of the cyber and physical worlds that could be achieved with the very low latency and high data capacity of Beyond 5G and 6G networks and thus the creation of services such as digital twins and internet of senses/haptic applications. This future eco-system is on course to be more collaborative and inclusive than previous generations of network, and FIDAL aims to lead the way by promoting open architectures, large experimentation sites and taking a multi-stakeholder approach. FIDAL steps in, targeting the augmentation of human capabilities, allowing Media & PPDR vertical industry players to perform advanced technological and business validation in large-scale field trials of highly innovative and advanced applications, that exploit Evolved 5G technologies. This, in turn, will provide extensive and valuable feedback to the broader industry, academia, innovators and community before wide commercial deployments of Evolved 5G networks throughout Europe. FIDAL key objective is to extend and deliver (i) advanced future proof Evolved 5G test infrastructures, anticipating evolution into next SNS phase, (ii) open & accessible to support 3rd party vertical experiments, (iii) test environments for rapid prototyping and large-scale validation of advanced, forward-looking applications. The project will build on the success of 5G-PPP Phase 3 projects, producing a unified experimentation framework with Zero-Touch orchestration, reusable Network Applications and secure AI as a Service capabilities. FIDAL will deploy 3 testbeds and 3 large-scale test infrastructures in Greece, Norway and Spain aiming to validate Evolved 5G technologies in a user context to maximise downstream take up, thus cultivating the ground for 6G.