Photographs from the ManuVAR demonstration phase in February and March 2012 are now available in the photo gallery section!

The final review meeting of the ManuVAR project took place at Thales Alenia Space Italia in Torino on 18th April. The meeting, attended by representatives from the EU Commission and members of the project consortium, was a great sucess.

A panel of managers from industry took part in a 'Round Table' panel the following day to discuss the real application of the ManuVAR system, with very positive feedback. Photographs from the session are available in the main photo gallery section.

ManuVAR is busy preparing for the next phase in the project, which is Demonstrations.

So stay tuned for photos!

Follow this link to see our partner Tim Bosch from TNO talking to BBC Nottingham live from the ManuVAR booth at JVRC2011! He describes how Augmented and Virtual Reality can improve our workplaces.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-15005553

Join us at the Joint Virtual Reality Conference of euroVR and EGVE this September where ManuVAR will sponsor a Workshop on 'VR, AR, MR and the future of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)'.

The workshop will take place on the afternoon of Tuesday 20th September at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

Invited speakers from key industries will present their use of PLM, how these technologies have or can support their activities, and a future vision. The workshop will be followed by a discussion panel of leading experts.

Visit www.jvrc2011.org to register your place at JVRC2011.

The President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano supporting A.A.R.B.A. conference on Behaviour-Based Safety (B-BS)

For the second consecutive year, the President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano has granted his personal support to the "European Annual Conference on Behaviour-Based Safety (B-BS)", by conferring a presidential medal to the scientific society A.A.R.B.A. as organizer of the event together with CCBS - Massachusetts.  The conference, attended by hundreds of safety experts from Italy, Europe and Middle East, took place in the State University of Milan on June 15-17, 2011.

A promising result for ManuVAR as the project has been selected to be showcased in Cordis Technology Marketplace:  "Reinventing manual work", EC CORDIS

ManuVAR information on CORDIS

20-21 September 2011, Nottingham, UK 

The Joint Virtual Reality Conference (JVRC2011) is an international event that will bring together people from industry, commerce, research including technology developers, suppliers and all those interested in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and 3D user interfaces (3DUI) to exchange knowledge and share experiences of new results and applications, live demonstrations of current and emerging technologies and form collaborations for future work.

Download Manuvar @ JVRC Flyer 

The ManuVAR Facebook and Twitter pages were launched in March 2011 and have been experiencing strong and continued growth. 

ManuVAR now has over 260 ‘Followers’ on Twitter and more than 60 ‘Likes’ on Facebook.

Trial 2 of the ManuVAR project took place successfully at VTT, Tampere, Finland at the end of March 2011 (March 28th - April 1st).

The project’s progress since previous trials was clear, especially in terms of the Core Application Tools’ (CAT) inter-connectivity.

ManuVAR was present at the two EuroVR Special Interest Group (SIG) meetings that were held in Laval, France at the beginning of April 2011, to coincide with Laval Virtual (http://www.laval-virtual.org). These two SIGs are "Design, Engineering and Manufacturing" and "Human Factors and Ergonomics"/"Improving Human Skills and Knowledge".

ManuVAR was also present at the XPRESS Status Colloquium “Knowledge-based Manufacturing – A new approach for precision assembly industries” in Stuttgart which took place on May 3rd - 4th 2011 at Fraunhofer IPA in Stuttgart. The event was organised by the XPRESS Integrated Project (http://www.xpress-project.eu/).

The second trial in the ManuVAR project, Trial 1, was successfully completed in San Sebastian, December 2010 (see Project Status - February 2011). Click here to see a short video of the trial. We are now busy preparing for Trial 2, which will take place in Tampere, Finland at the end of March.

ManuVAR follows a semi-agile iterative development process. The first year of the project was dedicated to the system design. During the second year there will be four implementation-trial iterations in the laboratory environment, and finally, the third and last year of the project will be dedicated to demonstration activities on the factory floor.

In May 2010 ManuVAR successfully passed the first year project review. The project has shown good scientific and technical progress within the allocated time and budget. As the EC Project Technical Assistant notes, ManuVAR studies an "interesting topic, relevant, (and) . . . . will be even more relevant in future". The project results are "good quality, the reports are very well done". Overall ManuVAR is on a "good track".

ManuVAR has established a cooperation with EuroVR, an international non-profit Association designed to bring together all those interested in VR/AR Technologies and to pursue the development and further deployment of such technologies. The EuroVR website is http://www.eurovr-association.org/

ManuVAR is planning to have a special session at Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics taking place in  Florida, USA from July 17-20, 2010.

For more information on AHFE 2010, click here.

The first video production by the ManuVAR project has been posted on YouTube.

The first press release from ManuVAR has been issued to coincide with the project's inaugural meeting in Tampere, Finland. The communique contains a statement of the project's objectives, methodologies and intended outcomes.