In the digital society's evolving landscape, open-source tooling and generative AI are pivotal in transforming global collaboration. These technologies promise to dismantle traditional barriers of accessibility, language, and governance, fostering an inclusive digital ecosystem. However, the journey towards a fully integrated digital society faces significant challenges, including trust, accessibility, and sustainable development. Emerging technologies like global ledgers and blockchain propose novel methods for transferring digital goods and personal data across diverse digital spaces. This development, coupled with augmented intelligence tools, aims to create decentralized and federated environments where creativity and collaboration can flourish. An "open metaverse" concept is gaining traction, promoting an alternative to restrictive proprietary platforms and emphasizing user empowerment and equity. Despite the opportunities, governance and ethical considerations remain paramount. The digital society must navigate the fine balance between innovation and the potential risks associated with new technologies. The drive for an inclusive, innovative, and secure digital society necessitates a commitment to open-source principles and ethical AI application. It also involves overcoming cultural, legislative, and technical barriers that impede global collaboration. The future digital society envisions a collaborative, inclusive, and innovative global community. By focusing on augmented intelligence and supported creativity, it aims to unlock new possibilities for economic empowerment, cultural exchange, and technological advancement. This vision is not without its challenges, but with continued commitment to ethical, open, and inclusive development, a more connected and empowered global community is within reach.

Mobile devices are now ubiquitous in daily life and the number of activities that can be performed using them is continually growing. This implies increased attention being placed on the device and diverted away from events taking place in the surrounding environment. The impact of using a smartphone on pedestrians in the vicinity of urban traffic has been investigated in a multimodal, fully immersive, virtual reality environment. Based on experimental data collected, an agent to improve the attention of users in such situations has been developed. The proposed agent uses explicit, contextual data from experimental conditions to feed a statistical learning model. The agent's decision process is aimed at notifying users when they become unaware of critical events in their surroundings.

The concept of supporting ad hoc or dynamic membership tele-present meetings through pulling up a chair is novel. In real world business situations, people pull up a chair after catching the eye of someone already seated. Telethrone is a situated display on a chair which allows multiple correct views of a remote collaborator. The system has been expanded to support informal meetings where chairs can be moved around. This is facilitated through the novel integration of a 3D reconstructed model of a person, with live viewpoint dependent rendering onto a retro-reflective surface. This removes the need for painstaking alignment of multiple cameras and projectors each time a chair is moved. A between subjects experiment tested accuracy of reconnected mutual gaze mediated by part of the system. Subjectively easier and harder situations are compared. Specifically best and worst cases, both in terms of orientation of eyes in the reconstructed head, and angle of observer gaze onto the display. Discussion compares results to experiments that used other systems to attempt to convey eye gaze by different techniques. This research builds toward a scalable system for ad hoc business meetings; a paradigm poorly supported by current video conferencing. It is also applicable to supporting conversations between seated people in any scenario where seats might be moved, for example in interaction between client and therapist in tele-therapy.

This paper will address challenges in aligning audio and visual cues when rendering fast moving objects within a high end multi-sensory virtual environment facility which employs 3D stereo visual projection and wave field synthesis. The visual and audio systems are linked via a network connection and updates from the visual system occur at discrete time intervals. This paper will demonstrate and assess the use of motion prediction strategies for the optimum updating of dynamic audio scenes independently of the constraints presented by the visual rendering system and network communication. This work has proven particularly useful for ecologically valid simulations of road traffic, rail and urban soundscapes.

We present research with two novel components; a system which may improve current small group telecommunication, and an experiment to test the efficacy. Telethrone projects a remote user onto a chair, bringing them into your space. The chair acts as a situated display which can support multi party head gaze, eye gaze, and body torque such that each observer knows where the projected user is looking. It is simpler to implement and cheaper than current systems. Our primary contribution is a counterbalanced repeated measures experiment to analyse gaze interactions. We analyse the multiple independent viewpoint support offered by the system to test if it demonstrates advantage over a set-up which shows a single view to both observers; in this results are inconclusive. Self-report questionnaire data suggests that the current implementation still gives the impression of being a display despite its situated nature although participants did feel the remote user was in the space with them. Results from the eye gaze analysis suggest that the remote user is not excluded from three way poker game-play.

This paper addresses some challenges associated with incorporating complex architectural data within a high end immersive multi-modal display system with integrated Wave Field Synthesis, for a real-time multisensory experience. Typically BIM & architectural data will have a very high polygon count, complex textural information and metadata. Parsing this data for associated auralistion with room acoustic prediction requires a large degree of simplification together with a rendering strategy that presents only the most subjectively important features of the soundscape whilst preserving ecological validity. This paper will present and assess automations and optimisations in the work flow for the fast realisation of multisensory virtual environments with convincing acoustic components.

Supporting a wide set of linked non-verbal resources remains an evergreen challenge for communication technology, limiting effectiveness in many applications. Interpersonal distance, gaze, posture and facial expression, are interpreted together to manage and add meaning to most conversations. Yet today's technologies favor some above others. This induces confusion in conversations, and is believed to limit both feelings of togetherness and trust, and growth of empathy and rapport. Solving this problem will allow technologies to support most rather than a few interactional scenarios. It is likely to benefit teamwork and team cohesion, distributed decision-making and health and wellbeing applications such as tele-therapy, tele-consultation, and isolation. We introduce withyou, our telepresence research platform. This paper describes the end-to-end system including the psychology of human interaction and how this drives requirements throughout the design and implementation. Our technology approach is to combine the winning characteristics of video conferencing and immersive collaborative virtual environments. This is to allow, for example, people walking past each other to exchange a glance and smile. A systematic explanation of the theory brings together the linked nature of non-verbal communication and how it is influenced by technology. This leads to functional requirements for telepresence, in terms of the balance of visual, spatial and temporal qualities. The first end-to-end description of withyou describes all major processes and the display and capture environment. An unprecedented characterization of our approach is given in terms of the above qualities and what influences them. This leads to non-functional requirements in terms of number and place of cameras and the avoidance of resultant bottlenecks. Proposals are given for improved distribution of processes across networks, computers, and multi-core CPU and GPU. Simple conservative estimation shows that both approaches should meet our requirements. One is implemented and shown to meet minimum and come close to desirable requirements.

Latency in a communication system can result in confusing a conversation through loss of causality as people exchange verbal and non-verbal nuances. This paper compares true end-to-end latencies across an immersive virtual environment and a video conference link using the same approach to measure both. Our approach is to measure end-to-end latency through filming the movements of a participant and their remote representation through synchronised cameras. We also compare contemporary and traditional immersive display and capture devices, whilst also measuring event latency taken from log files. We compare an immersive collaborative virtual environment to a video conference as both attempt to reproduce different aspects of the face-to- face meeting, the former favouring appearance and the latter attention. Results inform not only the designers of both approaches but also set the requirements for future developments for 3D video which has the potential to faithfully reproduce both appearance and attention.

This report details the development of a third version of MINT (Modeling Income in the Near Term), a tool for simulating the retirement incomes of members of the Baby Boom and neighboring cohorts. MINT3 can produce projections of economic and demographic characteristics in the year 2020, at the time of retirement, and for other years and ages. It can be used both to construct a baseline using alternative economic and demographic assumptions and to analyze the distributional consequences of a variety of Social Security policy changes.