ViTALiSE: Virtual to Augmented Loop in Smart Environments

Future workplaces will be smart environments providing human users with features and functionalities augmenting their capabilities while lowering their cognitive/physical efforts. This cannot disregard the synergistic interplay between the physical and digital reality. ViTALiSE (as Virtual to Augmented Loop in Smart Environments) is a vision of future smart environments integrating Human-Agent Collectives (HAC) with Digital Twins (DTs). HAC puts hw/sw agents on par with humans, and promotes seamless social interaction, but lacks thorough investigation of the deep relations between both human and software agents with their environment, which is simultaneously physical and virtual. DTs focuses on projecting physical things and processes into a virtual overlay, where humans can manipulate them with higher capabilities and lower cognitive effort, but limited attention is devoted to the fact that humans may work simultaneously in the virtual and physical layer. ViTALiSE proposes to integrate the HAC and DTs perspectives to overcome their individual limitations.