CognitiveXR

CognitiveXR is a platform to enable smart-city-scale cognitive augmentation by seamlessly integrating augmented reality, edge computing, and AI.

With CognitiveAR we’re developing a proof of concept for an urban augmented reality platform that enables Cognitive Augmentation with AR wearables. We are recipients of a Netidee 2020 grant (13% acceptance), thanks to which we are now able to put more effort into this project.

Our team

We are researchers from TU Wien and VRVis, at the intersection of distributed systems, mixed reality, edge computing, and AI systems. Find out more about us on our team page.

Our vision

Ever since watching Hyper-Reality, a short film about the future of Extended Reality (XR), I’ve been fascinated by the question of how this–rather dystopian–vision could be re-interpreted instead to benefit society, and what would be necessary to realize it technologically. Many smart-glasses project fail because they struggle to enable applications beyond showing notifications or access a weather API. Or wearables tend to be custom made for a very specific use case. If AR wearables are going to become prevalent, it’s clear that we will not have a dozen different glasses lying around, one for each use case. General-purpose AR wearables are the future, but it’s challenging to develop interesting applications, simply because such applications require real-time access to context-specific sensor data from the environment, or need to run complex computer vision models that are too expensive to run on the device itself. Offloading AI tasks to do real-time video analytics on the feed from the wearable, as well as processing sensor data in real-time on the wearable, will be key.

Watch our project proposal video for more details:

Moving forward

As humans, things, and AI grow closer together, our mission is to develop responsible, scalable, and democratized technology for societal good that fosters this partnership.