THEIA-XR

THEIA^XR – Making the invisible visible for off-highway machinery by conveying eXtended Reality technologies

THEIA-XR (Making the invisible visible for off-highway machinery by conveying extended reality technologies) aims at improving human-machine interaction in mobile machinery by enhancing user technology fit and extending reality technologies and functionalities. The results will make the invisible visible respectively the non-perceivable perceivable to the human operator, extending the perceivable range of the operator without negatively influencing the performance of the human while controlling the machinery. The project will ensure positive impact of eXtended Reality technologies on the safety, security trustworthiness and societal aspects of the interaction between the machine, the human operator and public/non-users, and furthermore create an XR

workplace that enables positive user experiences of self-efficacy and meaningfulness of work.

THEIA-XR will leverage a human-centred transdisciplinary and scenario-based co-design methodology with users, stakeholders and multidisciplinary researchers as a fully integrated project team. This methodology serves to collect human requirements and to design, develop and deploy the extended reality technologies for information presentation and interaction in the off-highway domain. The targeted extended reality technologies will enhance conventional human-machine interfaces through multi-modal information and interaction technologies, deploying innovative data visualization methods, force feedback technology and acoustic information.

The THEIA-XR approach for improving the human operator tasks by deploying extended reality technologies will be initially validated and tested in three uses cases in the off-highway domain, targeting snow grooming, logistics and construction scenarios, integrating real end-users, public/non-users and real-life data from dedicated industrial environments.

The project will verify the impact of extended reality technology on the safety, security and trustworthiness of the interaction between the machinery and the human operator, thereby satisfying the individual needs of the different operators. In three use-cases in the field of (mobile) machinery from the off-highway and logistics domain, the implementation of novel extended reality technologies and modalities will be investigated and developed, providing improved, humane and sustainable interaction between the human operator, the machinery and the environment the machinery is performing its tasks in.

The THEIAXR project will deliver the following key innovations:

• Extended Reality technologies applicable to state-of-the-art operating environments (cabin-based and tele-operational) to make the invisible visible to the human operator. Combination of enhanced visualisations (AR) with sound and haptic feedback that increases accessibility of extensive digital data related to a physical reality.
• XR interaction concept and design principles that facilitates a human friendly and intuitive design of XR interaction in industrial applications, also enabling further users to cover the three fundamental aspects of human technology development, i.e., human states, capabilities and experiences/technology potential and capabilities/task and environmental requirements.
• A transdisciplinary co-design methodology to design and develop multimodal XR information presentation and interaction solutions that enable intuitive, user-friendly, secure, trustworthy, positively experiences and highly accepted off-highway machine workplaces and that can be transferred to comparable technology developments.

The THEIAXR consortium consists of 10 organizations from 6 European countries. The consortium includes large enterprises, SMEs, universities and a research institute specialized in Extended Reality technologies, human-machine interaction and social aspects of human behaviour with mobile machinery.