Five Questions to Michael Barngrover

The Virtual Worlds Strategy of the EU is being implemented, e.g. the EU has published its Virtual Worlds Toolbox, and the strategic partnership virtual worlds is being set up with Siemens in the lead. 
And the EU has just published a number of Calls on April 22^nd. 
Find more information here.

Michael Barngrover, managing director of XR4 Europe since July 2023, lives in Brussels and thus is close to all developments at the EU level. We talked to him about those developments and about XR4 Europe. 

But before we dive in, we would like to introduce Michael: he is a developer of immersive experiences and a researcher of collaboration in shared virtual spaces. He lived in Istanbul, where for several years he was a proponent of the emerging XR sector in Turkey. He is also passionate about projects focusing on historical or cultural heritage subjects. During the Corona pandemic he organized the ZeroEvents, a series of weekly explorations of multiuser virtual platforms for the XR Crowd. He is an XR enthusiast and great and important supporter of the XR developent in the EU. You also find him on Linkedin.

01. What is XR4Europe, its mission and its history? What benefits do the members get? 
XR4Europe is an association that supports those who work with immersive technologies in Europe. Because our work and mandate are not exclusive to a particular sector, our members are diverse and include SMEs in the creative industries and some providing enterprise and industrial solutions, commercial researchers and developers, universities, and individual professionals. But our core members are other associations, clusters, and hubs—the national and regional organisations across Europe.

What we do is help our members to be visible at the European level, and, when we can, outside of Europe as well. Visibility is a requirement to find and be found for new business and projects, but it’s also a requirement to be heard and counted by policymakers when the European Commission is developing new programs and initiatives. So we support our members to know about funding opportunities, engage in activities that will inform policymaking, and connect with potential collaborators and partners.

02. You can compare the development of XR in the different regions in Europe. Can you give us some examples that should inspire people in other regions?
One of the things that I appreciate most about the European ecosystem is how much it contributes to the rest of the world, but that’s something that is often overlooked when people talk about XR in Europe and the health of the industry. Spain and Ireland are places where companies are very active service providers to clients in South/Central and North America, for example. There are also companies from all across Europe, even in the Balkans, that are competing successfully in emerging markets like the UAE and Saudi Arabia. For me, the takeaway is that every region in Europe possesses the human expertise and technical resources to contribute to the global market.

03. What are the current EU calls and in which way does XR4Europe help? 
Well, the Creative Europe calls for Cooperation Projects are out, with a deadline in early May. The Digital Europe work programme was just published with two calls specifically for virtual worlds. And the Horizon Europe work programme is due to be released publicly before the end of April. There will be three very prominent calls for virtual worlds—one for core technologies like photonics, another for generative AI, and one for interoperable Web 4.0. So there are a lot of calls open or opening in the coming weeks.

On the smaller scale are the cascade funding calls inside some EU-funded projects. They are small amounts of funding, but are for shorter and more focused work, making them even more attractive for SMEs. Master XR is one that just announced their open call, and the VR Health Champions project, of which XR4Europe is a partner, also just launched its first open call.

For the bigger calls, XR4Europe works to matchmake our members with potential partners to form consortia. We host online meetups to discuss particular calls and brainstorm collectively project ideas.

For the cascade fundings, we help to make sure our members are aware of them and help them to understand what the relevant EU project wants to fund. Usually that is clear from the call documentation, but sometimes there are questions and it’s not easy to connect with the project team. In those cases, we use our connections and network to connect with the funding project and clarify for our members the call and its objectives.

04. You are participating in the EU project XR4HUMAN. What is this about and where can we get more information?
The XR4HUMAN project is a Coordination and Support Action (CSA), so its objective is to support future initiatives with foundation work, in this case on the topic of ethical design and development of XR. It has several important deliverables, the headline one being the development of a European XR Code of Conduct to guide designers, developers, and deployers of XR applications to make ethically-informed decisions. The project will also produce an interoperability guide and a rating system for XR experiences. In addition to documents, XR4HUMAN has also created an Experience Library, to showcase best practices from the industry in the form of non-commercial projects and demos, and the XR4HUMAN Forum, which is an online chat space for industry professionals and researchers to discuss and debate topics relevant to ethics, interoperability, and best practices.

XR4Europe is actually in that CSA project and another one, called OPENVERSE, which focuses on generating open standards for co-creative virtual world platforms. Both XR4HUMAN and OPENVERSE are supporting the creation of the new Virtual World Partnership that Siemens is leading.

05. What is your wish for the future development of XR in Europe?
Of course, I’d like to see European XR become broader in terms of hosting foundational software and hardware production. Digital sovereignty is a big political topic, but the grassroots side to the issue is that we don’t have enough choice in the market with regard to hardware and, in many cases, to our software services and tools. If we had more European players in this space, even at the medium scale, it would be a tremendous benefit to both the European and the global XR industry.

For example, I look at the Bigscreen Beyond 2 headset as the kind of thing that could be designed and produced in Europe. The people I know who have bought the first Beyond headset loved it and lived and worked in Europe. It’s a PCVR headset and won’t be produced in the millions, but they are produced in small batches and are specialised devices designed by expert enthusiasts. That sounds like a successful European product to me.

Thinking bigger, I’d like to see an open-source real-time engine to compete with Unity and Unreal—an open-source initiative that emulates the Blender Foundation. That would really require major investment, like a Horizon Europe project and more, but the benefits again would be for the global XR ecosystem. It’s hard to imagine such a project being undertaken, let alone being successful, anywhere else in the world but Europe.

So to answer your question more concisely, I’d like to see everyone in Europe, from us in the industry and research to those making policy, both think bigger and think smaller.