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Public investments in XR continue to increase

Besides the large investments of big tech and other companies in (segments of) the XR stack also governments are starting to recognise XR’s potential in innovation, productivity, and economic growth.

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Therefore, in various domains and sectors, public investments in XR are growing both nationally and internationally, with a shift towards funding more practical applications and use cases. For example, in healthcare (surgical training and mental health therapy), in defence (combat training, drone management and operations), in urban planning, and in education programmes (simulator-trained professionals).

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In the Netherlands, the establishment of large public-private research and innovation programs indicates substantial national public investment, alongside several Horizon Europe calls focusing on Virtual Worlds.

Maturity

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More diversified access to large AI models Increase in co-evolution between hardware and AI Collaboration between humans and AI Democratisation of XR content creation using generative AI Public investments in XR continue to increase Standardisation of data space architectures for secure and trusted data sharing Growing significance of augmented data management Trusted digital recognitions are emerging Digital Trust Frameworks: from hierarchical to distributed trust Emerging dualuse of AI in cybersecurity More accessible privacy-enhancing technologies to share data Rising pressure to prepare for post-quantum cryptography Emergence of measures for secure Internet of Things The growing need for security protocols to work in the cloud Growing investments in the European cloud infrastructure & sovereignty More AI-driven hardware in data centres to manage workloads in the cloud Increasing need for heterogeneous and hybrid computing platforms Trade-offs in accuracy with approximate computing Fixed wireless access Fibre optic networks: strategic infrastructure for the knowledge economy Enhancing quantum computing robustness and potential Quantum sensing integration to other domains

Drivers

Impact

education

Education

  • Increasing public investments in XR accelerate adoption in education, leading to more institutions gaining access to high-fidelity virtual environments like simulators and training applications.
Research

Research

  • XR focused public funding could shift priorities to applied studies validating measurable quality gains of the real-life usage of virtual environments for training and simulations (such as fewer accidents and higher pass rates).
Operations

Operations

  • Better-organised research and innovation consortia accessing specific public funding pipelines on XR enable faster adoption and shared usage of XR infrastructures.
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