Rainbow to support the Horizon Europe programme

PARIS, FRANCE, December 8th 2022 - Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, a leading provider of network, communications and cloud solutions, is taking part in the CORTEX2 (COoperative Real-Time EXperiences with EXtended reality) consortium.

With AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) at the heart of its technology development, ALE will support CORTEX2 on its mission to democratise access to remote collaboration offered by next-generation XR (Extended Reality) experiences across a wide range of industries and SMEs.

CORTEX2 is an eight-million-euro initiative funded by the European Commission through the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. The consortium is composed of 10 organisations across seven countries that will work together for 36 months.

The CORTEX2 platform will be operated from the ALE cloud, and Rainbow^TM by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise will be used as a backbone for the innovative extended reality-based tele-cooperation concept to ensure large scale adoption and rapid scaling.

The global health crisis accelerated remote working and led to a sharp increase in the use of videoconferencing and platforms enabling teamwork. Today, XR-based tools, which can enhance remote collaboration communications, present significant challenges for most businesses.

Through the partnership of all ten organisations CORTEX2 aims to simplify XR technology adoption and will provide:

• Full support for Augmented Reality (AR) experiences as an extension of video conferencing systems when using heterogeneous service end devices through a novel Mediation Gateway platform.
• Resource-efficient teleconferencing tools through innovative transmission methods and automatic summarisation of shared long documents.
• Easy-to-use and powerful XR experiences with instant 3D reconstruction of environments and objects, and using recognised gestures to trigger corresponding actions in collaborative meetings.
• Fusion of visual and audio elements for multichannel semantic interpretation and enhanced tools such as virtual conversational agents and automatic meeting summarisation.
• Full integration of internet of things (IoT) devices into XR experiences to optimise interaction with running systems and processes.

Half of the total budget of the project will be dedicated to recruiting tech startups and SMEs to support with co-development. This investment aims to engage new use-cases to demonstrate CORTEX2 capabilities and assess the social impact associated with the adoption of XR technology in both external and internal use cases.

As a part of its mission, the consortium will enable third parties, including small and medium enterprises, to use the CORTEX2 generic framework to develop their own services. The Rainbow cloud-based Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) will be a key component of the project that supports fully interactive XR-based cooperation and will be showcased in three planned pilots: industrial production, business meetings and remote training.

• Industrial production: Creating an immersive XR experience to carry out remote industrial maintenance using various mobile devices in limited bandwidth environments.
• Business meetings: Offering Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality enriched business meetings for seamless inclusion of remote participants and improved productivity.
• Remote technical training: Using VR/AR for efficient knowledge transmission where the remote instructor can demonstrate complex operations to multiple trainees using an immersive 3D model of industrial equipment.

The ultimate goal for this partnership is to extend video conferencing to more than just screen-to-screen interactions, enabling the integration of XR-based tools into business communications for seamless remote communication collaboration.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement N° 101070192.