Design Academy Eindhoven’s Trans Realities Lab Awarded €650,000 to Build Open Web 4.0 Virtual World for European Opera

DAE joins nine-partner Horizon Europe consortium to develop Operaland — a persistent virtual world platform for European performing arts

Eindhoven, Netherlands

Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) and its Trans Realities Lab (TRL) have been awarded €650,000 as primary technical partner in the European Union funded project VOPUS (Virtual World Opera for Participation, Unity, and Social Cohesion), a Research and Innovation Action under Horizon Europe’s call on the evolution of culture in virtual worlds (HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-05). The 36-month project brings together nine partners across six countries under the coordination of Aalto University, Finland, with a total budget of €3.5M.

VOPUS investigates a question that is becoming increasingly urgent for European cultural policy: what are the long-term social and cultural impacts when citizens spend significant parts of their lives in virtual and persistent digital worlds? The project uses opera, one of Europe’s most historically embedded and craft-intensive art forms, as its research lens, studying how virtualising participation and production affects social cohesion, wellbeing, and cultural identity across communities. The project also asks what persistent virtual worlds can offer the cultural sector more practically: how institutions whose reach has historically been constrained by geography and the economics of live production can find new audiences, and what that expansion means for the long-term resilience of European cultural heritage.

DAE leads the design, development, and operation of the project’s central persistent virtual world environment: technically and visually. This environment will be built on open, interoperable Web 4.0 standards including glTF 2.0, OpenXR, WebXR, and WebGPU. Designed from the outset to avoid vendor lock-in and to be transferable across European cultural institutions, the environment will host persistent opera worlds and themes across three escalating pilot productions, targeting large numbers of regular users whose engagement also supports the project’s Social Sciences and Humanities research objectives.

This project is the first major instantiation of a new open platform core being developed by the Trans Realities Lab, a generic, reusable foundation deeply integrated with its previous project XR-IT and capable of underpinning persistent virtual world applications well beyond this project. XR-IT itself reached TRL 8 in 2024–25, with its culminating proof of concept being Cat Content; the world’s first live motion capture animated film produced simultaneously across physical locations in Helsinki, Eindhoven, and Stuttgart, awarded the International Production Award at Hamburg’s Next Reality Festival 2025 for innovation in Distributed Virtual Production. The new VOPUS platform core will directly build on the architectural knowledge and operational experience accumulated through XR-IT’s development, extending it into a foundation that European cultural institutions can own, deploy, and build on.

“VOPUS is the natural next step in a trajectory we have been building for several years,” said Dr Ian Biscoe, Professor of Transdisciplinary Design Networks at DAE and Founder of the Trans Realities Lab. “XR-IT gives us a production-tested foundation, demonstrated at TRL 8 through real distributed productions across multiple countries, and in VOPUS we are building directly on that to develop a new open platform core capable of underpinning persistent virtual worlds well beyond this project. VOPUS’ networked environment is its first major instantiation: a serious research environment, but one built to production-grade standards on open, interoperable infrastructure that European cultural institutions can actually own and build on. The question of what persistent virtual worlds do to culture and social life is one of the defining challenges of the coming decade, and we think European institutions need to be actively shaping the answer, on their own terms, with infrastructure they control.”

VOPUS continues DAE’s commitment to European-led, open standards-based approaches to persistent virtual worlds. The Trans Realities Lab is an active participant in the EU VR/AR Coalition, the Virtual Worlds Association, and the Metaverse Standards Forum, and this project will contribute directly to standards development and dissemination through those channels.

The VOPUS consortium brings together a deliberately multidisciplinary group of partners: Aalto University (coordinator, research framework and methodology), the Trans Realities Lab at Design Academy Eindhoven (platform development, Operaland virtual world delivery and associated content), Digital Catapult (UK, responsible innovation and industry adoption), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (accessibility, standards, audience research), Fundamental Research (Belgium, neurodiverse audience expertise), the Finnish National Opera and Ballet, Staatstheater Augsburg, State Opera Stara Zagora, and Sunderland Software City (skills foresight and dissemination).

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.