Virtual worlds with room for everyone
About the project
ORIGINS – Open Realities for Inclusive Generative Immersive Narrative Spaces – is a three-year Horizon Europe Innovation Action working to improve the quality of human experience in immersive virtual environments. The aim is easy to state and hard to achieve: let people learn, collaborate and create together in worlds that feel safe, authentic, adaptive and open to all.
The challenge
What holds immersive experiences back
Thin presence
Rigid avatars and scripted interactions can't carry the identity, emotion and body language that make human contact feel real.
Uneven access
Assistants and avatars rarely adapt to a person's language, culture, abilities or emotional state, so many users are effectively shut out.
Locked-up creation
Authoring tools are too complex for museums, teachers or clinicians to shape their own content and tell their own stories.
Our approach
Three technologies, working as one
Holoportation
Real-time volumetric capture brings real people into a shared space with their face, gaze, gesture and identity intact - while AI cleans up and compresses the stream on the fly, so it stays lifelike even at a distance.
Multimodal & inclusive interaction
People interact through voice, gesture, gaze and emotion, supported by live translation and accessible interfaces, so an experience holds up across languages and abilities.
Generative AI
AI composes stories, characters and guidance in the moment - multilingual, multimodal, and shaped by each person's context and curiosity.
From idea to impact
What the project sets out to do
- Put people first - a human-centred, inclusive design method behind every technology we build and test.
- Make presence feel real - combine live co-presence with adaptive generative agents for natural, multilingual, multimodal exchange
- Interact on human terms - systems that read and respond to voice, gesture, gaze and emotion.
- Bring virtual humans to life - lifelike, multilingual AI companions and avatars.
- Prove it in the real world - four pilots in culture, education, tourism and health.
- Make it last - dissemination, exploitation, open science and standardisation so results outlive the project.
From idea to impact
Part of Europe's investment in trustworthy Virtual Worlds
ORIGINS is funded under Horizon Europe within Cluster 4 (Digital, Industry & Space), answering the call HORIZON-CL4-2025-03-HUMAN-15, “Generative AI for Virtual Worlds.” As an Innovation Action, it matures proven research into technology validated at real-world scale. Over 36 months, ten partners from six countries contribute to Europe’s ambitions for human-centric AI and Virtual Worlds, to the meaningful involvement of the social sciences and humanities, and to the digital sovereignty of Europe’s cultural, education, tourism and health sectors.
What we're building
One open platform. Three technologies. Four places it has to prove itself.
ORIGINS combines real-time holoportation, multimodal interaction and generative Al in a single, human-centred platform – then puts it to work with real people in culture, education, tourism and healthcare. Every part is designed to be accessible, tested in the open, and released as tools that others across Europe can reuse long after the project ends.