The Horizon Europe - Work Programme 2021-2022 in the DESTINATION – A HUMAN-CENTRED AND ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL AND INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGIES clearly states that “The COVID-19 crisis has shown how important distance and innovative learning is for society, our children, their parents and their teachers, maintaining social and educational links under challenging circumstances. Emerging technologies such as virtual reality, eXtended Reality or immersive environments provide numerous opportunities for personalized, innovative, efficient and inclusive learning, for learners of all ages, gender and condition”. The proposal fully accomplishes this statement by offering the possibility of conducting distance learning and educational activities in an innovative, meaningful and immersive manner even when such activities involve interaction with devices, equipment or instruments located in remote laboratories. Moreover, the network of laboratories based on and exploiting the extended reality will assure several advantages and positive impacts on different aspects, which are enlisted and summarized in the following for the sake of the clarity.
A first relevant consideration holds for the general impact in terms of sustainability brought by the proposed solution; two main reasons can be taken into account. In most of the laboratories, either didactical or industrial, there are still several old instruments whose integration in the current paradigm of Internet of Things would be denied by the presence of non compliant communication ports and standards. Rather than disposing and replacing them with more up-to-date, easier-to-integrate versions (thus creating electronic waste that must be disposed of with all due care and attention), the proposal allows them to be resurrected to a new life, transforming them into resources that can be incorporated into the IoT universe. On the other hand, the pollutant emissions associated with traveling in personal or public vehicles to the laboratories from students homes are also drastically reduced. Students and workers are no longer required to travel to the physical locations in order to apply for additional training in the labs.
Moreover, the laboratory network will help to reduce both gender and geographical discriminations. Unfortunately, in several regions of Southern Italy women are still limited in their participation at training activities and are usually victims of the choice between domestic care and personal training. The possibility of acquiring a complete distance learning (not limited to theoretical subjects but also including practical and operative activities) will help them to reach the equality in training conditions with men. The geographic conformation of some areas makes access to institutional locations difficult, especially in the case of adverse weather events. Therefore, the ability to access training resources from anywhere at any time will reduce the gap due to this problem.
The knowledge impact of the project is evidenced by the supporting letter, forwarded to the PI by Prof. Giuseppe Spadafora is Full Professor of SPECIAL EDUCATION AND PEDAGOGY at University of Calabria and, since 2012, Chair of the Ph.D. school "Training of the person and the labor market" – Calabrian headquarters” at the University of Bergamo
As for the knowledge improvements, the objectives of this project are fully compliant with the requirement of “gaining industrial leadership in eXtended Reality technologies and immersive environments, while ensuring the European values of privacy, ethics and inclusiveness. It also aims to support the digital transformation of education through these technologies in particular.” The improvements are not limited to the extended reality and its applications for innovative distance learning; both technological and scientific advances achieved for the implementation of the control proxy and the associated methods for the performance assessment would be easily extended to other application fields thus proving themselves as relevant milestones. As an example, the delay measurement and characterization of the transmission system for the communication with the instruments will help to its reduction in order to assure didactical, training or industrial experiences characterized by higher immersiveness.
The achievements of the project turn out to be technological innovation and can be easily converted into industrial applications. Most of the components of the architecture will be ad hoc defined, designed and implemented, since they are neither available on the market nor present in the scientific literature. Moreover, the improvements brought by the proposal will pave the way for a real-time remote control of systems that would be a breakthrough in the industrial metaverse applications. It is worth noting that the developed devices, methods and protocols for ER didactics would be easily extended for the training of workers and/or clients for the industries. Consider, for example, a multinational company with several locations distributed around the world and the need to train a worker in the use of a specific measuring instrument or device. Rather than traveling or moving the device (with all the associated costs, including insurance), one can imagine that the trainer and trainee could each wear a 3D visor and share the training experience in an extended reality space. From an industrial point of view, the expertise and know-how gained by the proponents will allow them to propose a SpinOff for offering the implemented services to industries.
The industrial impact of the project is confirmed by endorsement letters from STMicroelectronics (STM), a company that develops a wide range of products, including discrete and standard commodity components, custom devices and semi-custom devices and application-specific standard and integrated circuits.
Another improvement will be surely associated with the scientific community reinforcement; the main target of the project is the realization of a laboratory network that inherently assumes an enlargement and enrichment of the interactions and interoperability among different actors of the scientific stage. Once confirmed the successful outcomes of the projects, the idea of the laboratory network will be extended at both national and international level (as confirmed also by the letters of intent received from both other universities and companies). Thanks to the network, the instruments virtualization and the provided ER environment, it will be possible to share equipment, instrumentation and experiments of the laboratories among researchers, scientists and technicians. The proposal would also be the starting point for successive common researches aiming at designing new distributed experiments and testbeds.
The possible extension of the laboratory network to the international community will naturally also improve the level of research internationalization. The successful project results will give the opportunity to create a network of laboratories at a world global level, each of which sharing its own resources and knowledge to assure an ubiquitous training for different types of users from different countries. In particular, the implemented laboratory network will establish a solid infrastructure for the transfer of knowledge thus making the proponents ready to apply to several sources of international fundings, such as Erasmus+ CBHE project KA2 and youth.
Finally, a specific attention will be paid on the dissemination and exploitation of the project results. To this aim, a suitable web platform will be first deployed in order to disseminate the project achievements and simultaneously inform the scientific communities about the services provided by the laboratory network. During the execution of the projects activities and also after project end, seminars at local, national and international level will be organized to promote the laboratory network activities, the potentiality of the ER didactic and training, and, possibly, attract new laboratories in the network. The results of the project will be also exploited to propose a SpinOff offering to industries at national and international level (i) services of virtualization and remote control of the equipment, instruments and devices they sell/use and (ii) design and develop of specific path for the ER didactic experience with the aim to increase the expertise of their clients.
