Acronym: ORIGINS
Title: Open Realities for Inclusive Generative Immersive Narrative Spaces
Call: HORIZON-CL4-2025-03
EU nr: 101298582
Period: 1 Aug 2026 - 31 July 2029
Total Budget : 5 126 095.00 EUR (requested EU : 4 336 735.00 EU); VUB budget: 567 250.00 EUR
Contact VUB: Prof. Dr. Wendy Van den Broeck and Mr. Simon Delaere
At ERIS we got a chance to talk to Wendy and asked 4 questions:
What is the ORIGINS project about, and what challenge in virtual worlds does it address?
ORIGINS — Open Realities for Inclusive Generative Immersive Narrative Spaces — is a three-year Horizon Europe Innovation Action (2026–2029) that aims to fundamentally improve the quality of human connection in extended reality (XR). Today’s virtual world platforms rely on rigid avatars and scripted content, which severely limits nuance, emotional expression, and natural communication between people. ORIGINS tackles this head-on by addressing three interrelated challenges: first, how to deliver AI-enhanced holoportation that preserves a person’s identity, facial dynamics, gestures, and gaze in real time; second, how to achieve truly inclusive multimodal interaction by integrating speech, gesture, gaze, translation, and accessible interfaces so that experiences remain usable across different abilities and languages; and third, how to enable generative narrative worlds where adaptive avatars, intelligent assistants, and context-aware content support co-created stories that reflect users’ own goals, culture, and environment. The project validates these advances across four concrete use cases: cultural heritage, educational training, virtual tourism, and health & rehabilitation.
How will ORIGINS make virtual experiences feel more natural, interactive, and human?
ORIGINS pursues a shift from scripted to generative, from isolated to shared, and from exclusive to inclusive XR. On the technical side, the project develops AI-powered pipelines that process depth and point-cloud data in real time, enabling lifelike holoportation that captures the subtle cues — a raised eyebrow, a hand gesture, a glance — that make communication feel genuine. Multimodal interaction is extended beyond the keyboard and controller: users will be able to speak, gesture, and use gaze as natural inputs, with automatic translation breaking language barriers and accessible design ensuring no-one is left out due to disability. On the content side, generative AI drives narrative worlds that adapt dynamically to who the users are and what they are trying to do together, replacing pre-authored scripts with emergent, co-created experiences. All components are designed around continuous human-centred evaluation — using psychophysical metrics, accessibility assessments, and iterative user-experience testing — to ensure that what is built actually feels authentic and trustworthy to the people using it.
What role does VUB play in the project?
VUB (SMIT) acts as the project’s Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) anchor, ensuring that every technological development is grounded in human-centred, ethical, and societal thinking. In practice, this means embedding co-creation and continuous user involvement throughout the entire project lifecycle, drawing on expertise in participatory design, inclusivity, accessibility, and user research. VUB leads the development of an Ethics and Societal Impact Toolkit that systematically assesses and strengthens the societal value and acceptability of project outcomes across all four use cases. Beyond this, VUB contributes to policy recommendations, standardisation efforts, and strategic roadmapping — including inputs aligned with the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) of the Virtual Worlds Association— to support alignment with European values and regulatory frameworks. Through Living Lab methodologies, validation activities, and targeted dissemination, VUB translates project insights into actionable knowledge for policymakers, industry partners, and the academic community. This way, VUB’s contribution spans the full arc of the project, from early design to final impact assessment.
How could ORIGINS change the way people learn, work, or connect in virtual environments in the future?
If ORIGINS delivers on its ambition, virtual environments will no longer feel like approximations of real presence — they will become genuinely expressive, inclusive spaces where people can learn, collaborate, and create together with the same richness as face-to-face interaction. For education, this means immersive training scenarios that adapt in real time to a learner’s actions and needs, potentially transforming how professional skills are acquired. For cultural engagement, it opens the possibility of experiencing heritage sites or artistic performances from anywhere in the world, with a sense of authentic co-presence alongside others. For health and rehabilitation, it points towards therapeutic virtual environments that are both more engaging and more accessible to patients with diverse abilities. More broadly, by proving that XR can be inclusive by design — working across languages, abilities, and cultural contexts — ORIGINS lays the foundation for a European approach to virtual worlds that prioritises people over platforms, and societal benefit over technological spectacle.