XR5.0: Human-Centric AI-Enabled Extended Reality Applications for Industry 5.0

Applications for Extended Reality (XR) are rapidly expanding across a wide range of industries, including gaming, entertainment, and healthcare. Accompanying this trend is the field of digital manufacturing, which encompasses a broad range of applications such as quick product design, remote maintenance, production process simulation, employee safety, and training. Industrial personnel may benefit from ergonomic and user-friendly cyber-representations of production processes using XR applications, particularly in the industrial arena. These cyber-representations are utilized to create augmented environments for training, simulation, and testing. The wave of Industry 5.0 (I5.0) applications that are certain to be human-centric and emphasize trustworthy human-machine collaboration cannot be supported by current systems because of several issues, such as the requirement for individualized XR visualizations and new methods for world-building, content production, and flow control aspects of XR systems. The XR5.0 project is presented in this publication with the goal of addressing these issues and offering a revolutionary Person-Centric and AI-based XR paradigm that will be customized to the needs and characteristics of I5.0 applications. The project outlines the organizing concepts and guidelines for utilizing XR in I5.0 applications, with a focus on the creation of cutting-edge "XR-made-in-Europe" technology that complements human-centered manufacturing techniques and upholds European ideals. The associated applications consider the workers’ environment through the incorporation of human-centered digital twins (DTs), which make up the "digital image" of the workers. This allows for the simultaneous design and implementation of an innovative fusion of cutting-edge AI paradigms and XR technology. The added value of the XR5.0 project is discussed, and potential use cases and user journeys are analyzed, leading to a discussion of the project’s revolutionary benefits and additional steps that should be taken.