Innovation for immersive applications and services

The composite, rich world of XR and holographic applications is one of the most emerging in the dramatically evolving ICT market scenario. These applications and services respond to a relentless demand of enhanced, more sophisticated user experience embracing all the vertical segments. Moreover, they have the chance to exploit some technological enablers (like the unprecedented performance of 5G communication networks, soon 6G, or the consolidated presence of cloud computing infrastructures), as well as supporting market trends like the emergence of Metaverse.

Nevertheless, on the actual operational standpoint, there is still a long way to go. On one hand, the infrastructure provisioning platforms are not ready yet to fully accommodate the demanding requirements of XR applications, allowing them to maintain a persistent high quality of experience for their final users. On the other hand, XR applications are not as mature yet for this transition: many of them are still using legacy monolithic approaches, and have to be redesigned in a modern, cloud-native shape to enable a fully optimized provisioning and execution. And here comes CHARITY…

How can CHARITY help XR and holographic services to make this leap forward towards excellence?

It provides a tailored platform for resource orchestration and application placement. On one hand, it supports the XR/holography developers representing their applications into modular, slice-based models. Once the application has been redesigned, CHARITY offers you a friendly environment to describe it in a structured format, facilitating the composition of software modules and connection links, stored as TOSCA files. On the other hand, it builds up a smart resource scheduling and component placement function, taking into account the application requirements and ensuring its components are deployed in the best available infrastructure to satisfy their QoS metrics.
CHARITY does not give up the XR service after its deployment! A closed control loop, fed by parameter measures coming from its monitoring system, follows the service detecting and even predicting quality degradations, and fixing them with workload reallocations or node reconfigurations to maintain the due service level.
Finally, besides offering you such a design and deployment framework, CHARITY is developing specific technology enablers enhancing XR and holography applications horsepower: building bricks like CH.E.S. (Charity Edge Storage), a dedicated edge storage service, customized Point Cloud codec, enhancements on video streaming and stream editing, etc.

The above, and other technical novelties, will be tested in a wide range of use cases, spanning different domains like VR medical training, operations training, VR tour creation, holographic assistance, collaborative gaming, holographic events. Through these variegated use cases, the improvement offered by the various CHARITY innovations will be assessed and made more visible.

Ultimately, CHARITY achievements have the potential to positively impact its two reference markets:

The market of VR/AR/holographic applications and services can benefit from CHARITY, due to the facilities offered for deploying such immersive services into a distributed cloud infrastructure. CHARITY supports decoupling of deployment management from core application development, that is particularly beneficial to small-medium enterprise like many XR application vendors are.
The market of infrastructure services can also receive positive impulse from CHARITY, since our project offers a technical solution to federate infrastructure providers under a common service orchestration. This feature can help in particular small-medium providers to better position themselves for serving new, emerging classes of advanced services, for instance to host the application components needing to be executed at a specific edge location.

Brief bio of author

M.Sc. Marco Di Girolamo (male): Graduated in Electronics Engineering summa cum laude in November 1986 at Università Politecnica delle Marche. Over 35 years of professional experience in R&D, IT and consulting positions in Italian and international Companies. In HP then HPE since 1993, covered positions in R&D as Development Engineer, Customer Care and IT Departments. Since 2002, he is leading HPE Italy activities into European collaborative research and innovation. In this position, he’s coordinated and led HPE Italy initiatives related to European innovation programs, including IST FP5, FP6, FP7, eContent, CIP, Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe project participations. He has been direct contributor to a number of projects, in particular, in the last years, in the areas of edge and cloud computing (ACCORDION, CHARITY), dataspace innovation (TRUSTEE), NFV and 5G technology (5GEx, T- NOVA, iJOIN), including paper authoring and contributions to the ETSI NFV ISG. In the past, he contributed to projects in datacentre energy efficiency, grid computing and e-government innovation domains. He has co-authored papers, contributed to efforts with standardization bodies, served in the Technical Project Committees of multiple international conferences.