The CYENS Centre of Excellence in Interactive media, Smart systems and Emerging technologies is a joint venture between the three public universities of Cyprus – University of Cyprus, Cyprus University of Technology, and Open University of Cyprus, the Municipality of Nicosia, and two renowned international partners, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany, and University College London, United Kingdom.
• We carry out high-impact research in Interactive media, AR/VR/XR, AI/ML and advanced analytics across several industry sectors including education, entertainment, cultural and creative industries, healthcare, IoT, and robotics.
• We provide access to technical expertise, specialized laboratories, equipment, and experimentation as well as innovation services, such as financing advice, training, and skills development that are needed for a successful digital transformation of both industry and the art scene.
We would like to invite you for collaboration for the 100% funded “Innovation Vouchers” Program. Each «Innovation Voucher» has a value of 5.000 Euros and can be redeemed by SMEs for specific innovation, technical or scientific services and know-how. Funding may cover research and technical consulting services, measurements, tests and analyses, access to research/laboratory infrastructures, and design and development of product and/or service prototypes.
Below we are listing some of our collaboration suggestions:
Digital Twins
The CYENS Centre of Excellence creates a Digital Twin of Nicosia, which will be a virtual representation of the city. It will use real-time data and other sources to enable learning, reasoning and dynamically recalibrating for “improved decision making”. Sectors deploying Urban Digital Twins technology include Cities, Districts, Airports, Manufacturing Plants, Urban Infrastructure, Utilities, for optimization of their building maintenance and operations, environmental impact and sustainability, productivity and space utilization.
The Digital Twin Services provided by iNicosia Team are the following:
1. 3D Reconstruction of an area, individual building or smaller scale objects using Laser Scanning and Terrestrial and Aerial Photogrammetry processes
2. Data visualization of IOT connected devices and sensors – augmentation of generated 3D models through dynamic and static data and metadata
3. Capability to run a series of simulations on the generated models, including crowd, traffic weather, light and more
4. Heritage site capture and documentation
5. Media production capabilities including walkthrough videos, presentation videos and other visual documentation
6. Generation of Interactive models for wide range of applications
Video Compression
Video compression is the core technology in live and on-demand video streaming and video conferencing applications. With global video traffic projected to surpass 82% of all Internet traffic by the end of 2022, there is a strong need to develop efficient compression algorithms to accommodate future growth. CYENS CoE can provide consulting on the efficient utilization of available resources (video codec software, storage, compute power) for different video content (sports, news, movies, animation, etc.) that is application specific while considering the underlying communication medium (wired/ wireless). Moreover, based on the afore-described scenarios, CYENS CoE can provide technical reports on video compression standards performance evaluation by jointly optimizing key video compression parameters such as video quality, bitrate demands, and complexity.
Virtual and Augmented Reality Applications
Many of the research teams of CYENS have long and extensive expertise in developing Virtual and Augmented reality systems for a broad spectrum of industrial applications.
Virtual and augmented reality systems, can help with a wide range of industry related issues such as increasing productivity, reducing training costs and increased availability of new products to market.
Specifically Virtual Reality technologies can be used for specialized training with realistic simulations while augmented reality is mostly used for the projection of digital information in real environments that can contribute to having reduced errors, improved reliability, increased speed of production, real time adaptability and safety in working environments.
A few examples of industries that VR and AR technologies are gradually becoming more and more essential include among others the automotive industry, healthcare, tourism, real estate, architecture, recruitment, entertainment, education and sports.
Figure 1 AR and VR examples of industry applications. Sources of images are from: https://www.banelec.com/, www.vkcreativelearning and https://intersog.com/.
Cultural Heritage Applications
CYENS has extensive expertise in areas related to cultural and creative industries including museums. Such work involves multidisciplinary expertise in museum studies, history, arts, archaeology, photography and new technologies such as 360 photography/video, photogrammetry, 3D modelling and AR/VR.
For more information, you can contact Mr. Andreas Psaltis, Partnership manager at [email protected], at 22747575.