Three Days of Collaboration, Demos & Deep Dive Discussions in Amsterdam
By: Desiree van den Hoek – SOUND
From July 1st to 3rd, 2025, the PRESENCE consortium came together for a three-day in-person meeting at the Sound office in Amsterdam. The PRESENCE Consortium Meeting was a vital milestone in the project, offering partners a shared space to align technical progress, reflect on ethical considerations, and test demos across four use cases.
You’ll discover how PRESENCE is setting new standards for realism, interaction, and emotional connection in virtual environments.
Day 1 – Progress and Prototypes
The meeting kicked off with a warm welcome and an overview of coordination and dissemination activities. During the afternoon, each use case team presented their progress, shared user feedback, and walked through roadmaps for the upcoming pilot deployments. Attendees had the opportunity to get hands-on with the demos – including experiences for professional collaboration, manufacturing training, healthcare, and cultural heritage.
To close the day meaningfully, the consortium visited Keti Koti at Museumplein – the annual commemoration of the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands – reflecting the importance of cultural awareness and inclusion within PRESENCE.
Day 2 – Ethics, Haptics and Internal Testing
The second day began with powerful discussions around ethics, trust, and privacy in immersive systems, led by JRS, IMEC, and UHAM. Technical updates followed on Holoportation (WP2), Haptics (WP3), and Virtual Humans (WP4), setting the stage for the project’s next development phase.
After a delicious lunch, the teams took part in a structured internal demo testing session, where all partners engaged as active users. Key takeaways and improvement points were shared in a joint feedback round, emphasizing the importance of collaboration in refining the PRESENCE experience.
Day 3 – Evaluation, Experiments & Next Steps
The final day focused on evaluation strategy and preparation for the September project review. IMEC presented results from user tests, while UHAM and UB introduced plans to measure the feeling of presence across use cases.
The meeting wrapped up with clear next steps, highlighting the project’s commitment to an inclusive, user-centric, and ethically grounded development approach.
Takeaways from the PRESENCE Consortium Meeting:
The PRESENCE Consortium Meeting reinforced the importance of collaboration across disciplines and partners in building next-generation immersive technologies that are not only innovative, but also inclusive, safe, and meaningful.
We’d like to thank all partners for their energy, input, and insights – We’re already looking forward to what comes next.
Stay tuned
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