iv4XR (Intelligent Verification/Validation for Extended Reality Based Systems), a Horizon 2020-funded European project, finished its run on 31 December 2022 with some very exciting outputs.

Coordinated by Rui Prada — INESC-ID Artificial Intelligence for People and Society Senior Researcher and Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico — and active between October 2019 and December 2022, iv4XR aimed to build “a novel verification and validation technology for XR [Extended Reality] systems based on techniques from AI to provide learning and reasoning over a virtual world.” Ultimately, iv4XR provided a novel toolkit for XR developers to test and explore their XR systems as they build them, bit by bit.

“Automating Quality Assurance (QA) tests of XR systems is a challenging but promising research field. It can bring great benefits to the XR industry by extending the possibilities of current QA practices and reducing its costs by reducing the need for user testing,” Prada commented.

The project has delivered the iv4xr toolkit — a multi-agent testing framework — as well as a bounty of publications. Looking back from the final consortium meeting that was held in person on 29 November 2022 in Utrecht (the Netherlands), Rui Prada emphasized that “In the past three years, the iv4XR team was highly engaged in achieving the ambitious vision of the project. We are proud of the results presented in the toolkit that establish the basis for agent-based testing as a practice to test XR systems. Our studies in the domains of games, AI simulations, and sensor networks show promising results for the value of the approach. We close the project with a sense of accomplishment, but with the certainty that many interesting research questions remain.”

To sum up the project the iv4XR team prepared the video below. Have a look at how XR system testing has just become easier: