Award Announcement
Nuwa's XR Ireland sister brand has been awarded funding through the European Commission's CORTEX2 Open Call Track 2 cascade mechanism to develop the XRisis platform for humanitarian emergency response training. The CORTEX2 consortium, led by the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence with partners including Alcatel Lucent Enterprise, CEA, and Linagora, selected XRisis from competitive proposals across Europe based on innovation potential, technical feasibility, market relevance, and alignment with advancing cooperative real-time extended reality experiences. The funding enables development of a proof-of-concept platform integrating multiple CORTEX2 enabling technologies including Rainbow CPaaS secure communication infrastructure, Video Call Alternative Appearance avatar systems, Conversational Virtual Agent AI dialogue capabilities, and automatic meeting summarisation services within immersive training environments addressing humanitarian sector needs.
Partnership with Action Contre la Faim
The project establishes development partnership with Action Contre la Faim's Emergency Readiness and Response Unit, which aims to enhance organisational capacity to respond to humanitarian crises through innovative training and simulation exercises. Action Contre la Faim operates across 56 countries providing emergency response services addressing hunger, malnutrition, and related humanitarian needs, with emergency preparedness training essential for maintaining 9,000 staff members' readiness to deploy rapidly and effectively when disasters strike. The collaboration positions Nuwa's technical expertise alongside Action Contre la Faim's humanitarian domain knowledge and access to emergency roster personnel for validation, creating the partnership structure necessary for developing training technology that serves genuine operational requirements rather than pursuing technological novelty without clear application value.
Three-Pilot Development Approach
XRisis will implement three distinct pilots addressing different emergency management cycle phases. Pilot 1 (Pre-Deployment Humanitarian Refresher) will enhance team preparedness in shared immersive spaces, offering scenario library for emergency lifecycle management induction training ensuring base knowledge acquisition. Pilot 2 (Country Office Emergency Preparedness Response Plan Strategy and Design Workshop Training) will create platform for Senior Management Team training on leading and designing EPRPs with headquarters during strategy workshops, facilitating remote testing and updating of operational plans. Pilot 3 (Global Metaverse Emergency Simulation Exercises) will design platform for inter-country emergency response simulations assessing capacity for remote and in-situ emergency plan implementation and coordination across multiple organisational actors. This progression from individual knowledge building through collaborative planning to complex multi-stakeholder coordination enables systematic capability development aligned with humanitarian organisational structures and operational workflows.
CORTEX2 Technology Integration
The platform will integrate four CORTEX2 enabling technologies validated through operational deployment. Alcatel Lucent Enterprise's Rainbow CPaaS will provide secure real-time voice and video communication backbone across all participant endpoints through Unity C# SDK integration. DFKI's Video Call Alternative Appearance will enable avatar-based video conferencing preserving presence whilst protecting privacy. CEA's Conversational Virtual Agent will power AI dialogue characters capable of domain-specific knowledge retrieval grounded in Action Contre la Faim documentation. Linagora's summarisation agent will generate automatic meeting summaries from call recordings supporting post-exercise analysis. This technology combination enables features impossible through conventional training delivery including distributed team collaboration across geographic boundaries, realistic stakeholder interaction through AI characters available on demand without role-player scheduling complexity, and comprehensive session documentation without manual facilitator note-taking burden.
Development Timeline and Validation Planning
The project will proceed through three phases spanning eleven months from August 2024 through June 2025. Phase 1 (August-September 2024) focuses on requirements gathering through user-centric design sessions combining conventional videoconferencing and collaborative immersive virtual world meetings. Phase 2 (October 2024-February 2025) implements platform capabilities integrating CORTEX2 enabling technologies with Unity-based multi-user environments deployed on European cloud infrastructure. Phase 3 (March-June 2025) conducts validation through rehearsal workshop with project team members followed by comprehensive evaluation workshop with Action Contre la Faim emergency roster personnel in Paris, generating quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback informing commercial platform development.
Strategic Significance
The CORTEX2 funding enables Nuwa to access cutting-edge research technologies and consortium expertise that would prove economically infeasible to develop or license independently, whilst providing European Commission with validation evidence about CORTEX2 capabilities addressing real-world humanitarian challenges with measurable social impact. The project contributes to European leadership in socially beneficial XR applications whilst addressing genuine training delivery gaps that conventional approaches cannot effectively resolve.