PRESENCE

Summary

PRESENCE investigates how advanced XR technologies can strengthen the sense of presence in shared physical-digital environments. The project addresses key perceptual dimensions including plausibility, co-presence and place illusion, with the aim of making remote interaction feel increasingly natural and convincing.

The project focuses on three main challenges. First, it explores realistic visual interaction between remote users through live volumetric capture, compression and optimization techniques for high-quality holoportation under heterogeneous computing and network conditions. Second, it investigates realistic touch between remote users and virtual objects through novel haptic systems and spatial synchronization across multiple devices. Third, it develops more realistic social interaction through avatars, autonomous agents and AI-powered virtual humans.

Within PRESENCE, Artanim focuses on smart autonomous virtual characters capable of generating physically plausible behavior while responding to social and contextual cues from human-controlled avatars and other agents.

The research investigates how virtual agents can adapt their movement and behavior to interpersonal distance, social conventions and collaborative tasks. For example, an agent can adjust its position and orientation to respect proxemic rules, or recognize when a user needs an object and respond by retrieving and offering it.

Partners

Fundació i2CAT (Spain)

Actronika (France)

University of Hamburg (Germany)

Centre for Research and Technology Hellas – CERTH (Greece)

Raytrix GmbH (Germany)

SenseGlove B.V. (Netherlands)

Go Touch VR SAS (France)

Didimo S.A. (Portugal)

Vection Italy Srl (Italy)

University of Barcelona (Spain)

Unity Technologies (Denmark)

Sound Holding B.V. (Netherlands)

Interuniversitair Micro-Electronica Centrum – imec (Belgium)

JOANNEUM RESEARCH Forschungsgesellschaft mbH (Austria)

SyncVR Medical B.V. (Netherlands)

Zaubar UG (haftungsbeschränkt) (Germany)

Artanim (Switzerland)

Related Publications

Mair S, Mostajeran F, Llobera J, Slater M, Steinicke F. Laughing Together: A Pilot Study on the Role of Virtual Agents in Emotional Contagion, Conformity, and Opinion Shaping in a Virtual Stand-Up Comedy Club, 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR), 1479–1489, October, 2025.
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Llobera J, Li K, Nagorny P, Charbonnier C, Steinicke F. A Conversational Virtual Agent with Physics-based Interactive Behaviour, 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct), Daejeon, South Korea, 973–974, October, 2025.
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Mostajeran F, Li K, Rings S, Kruse L, Wolf E, Schmidt S, Arz M, Llobera J, Nagorny P, Charbonnier C, Fassold H, Alvarez X, Tavares A, Santos N, Orvalho J, Fernández S, Steinicke F. A toolkit for creating intelligent virtual humans in extended reality, IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), Saint-Malo, France, 736–741, March, 2025.
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