Israel in ITEA

The ITEA 2 Board is excited by the Metaverse1 vision of the future and what has been delivered. This project focused on the connection between virtual and real worlds. Among a large number of deliveries there is a generic architecture pushed in MPEG-V, supporting sensor/actuator/robot integration, avatar modelling and hybrid communications. The project has been strongly involved in dissemination with 68 papers, but the most important result is definitively the ISO/IEC 23005 standard ensured through a great involvement of the project in MPEG-V. A set of use cases prefigure future businesses such as virtual travel, serious gaming and virtual presence.

The ITEA Board appreciates the content-delivery framework developed in CAM4Home allowing users and contents providers to deliver rich multimedia experiences. Its ‘create-once, deliver-anywhere’ approach enables ubiquitous access to any contents on any device through all networks. Key innovations comprise the metadata framework, an open service platform and domain-specific devices such as content analysis, adaptation and delivery through heterogeneous networks. Exploitation includes: online gaming with Facebook-like updates, games ratings and new friend notifications; improved management of live webcasts; and live sports-events production with automated media asset management for the 2012 London Olympics.

The ITEA 2 Board appreciated the usage orientation of SmartTouch: touching and interacting. By promoting near-field communications (NFC) technology in many different applications, such as ticketing, the home and e-health, the consortium succeeded in rapid exploitation of the research results. Examples include Gemalto, which provided the world’s first commercial NFC SIM based mobile contactless system already deployed on a large scale in Taiwan, a Nokia NFC mobile phone, public-transport ticketing in Frankfurt and the Touchatag ALU spin-off. The consortium has also made an impressive dissemination effort (350 publications).