The realization of the paradigm of Internet anywhere, anytime and any-device and the diffusion of end-user multimedia devices with powerful and user-friendly capabilities such as smartphones, tablets PCs, mobile gaming terminals and e-books, are leading to the proliferation of a significant amount of emerging multimedia services: immersive environments, mobile online gaming, 3D virtual world, book/newspaper consumption, social networking, IPTV applications, just to cite a few. Some of these services have already reached a major market success, such as the case of newspaper/magazine mobile readers and smartphone multimedia apps. Their success has been achieved especially because a user-centered approach has been followed to design the whole process of content production, service activation, content consumption, service management and updating. From these considerations it arises that management of the Quality of Experience (QoE) is undoubtedly a crucial concept in the deployment of future successful services and it is straightforward to be understood but complex to be implemented in real systems, since there are many variables which will affect QoE, and these variables are changeable and span multidisciplinary areas including multimedia signal processing, communications, computer networking, psychology and sociology. This Network focuses on the analysis, design, optimization and management of the QoE in advanced multimedia services, creating a fully-integrated and multi-disciplinary network of 12 ESRs working in and seconded by 7 academic institutions, 3 private companies and 1 standardization institute distributed in 6 European countries and in Korea. This Network will offer to a group of newly recruited Fellows in a cross-sectoral environment to shape their long-term research view and get fundamental methodological tools on various research fields, namely: multimedia networking, signal processing, communications, business, psychology and sociology.

The project will create a leading European-wide doctoral Collegium for research in Advanced Visual and Geometric Computing for 3D Capture, Display, and Fabrication (EVOCATION). The Collegium will train the next generation of creative, entrepreneurial and innovative experts who will be equipped with the necessary skills and competences to face current and future major challenges in scalable and high-fidelity geometry and material acquisition, extraction of structure and semantic information, processing, visualization, 3D display and 3D fabrication in professional and consumer applications. In the future, the ESRs will lead research and development of new visual and geometric computing methods in the widest variety of applications, ranging from industrial design to humanities, from medical training to urban assessment, and from creative industries to education methodologies. The EVOCATION network of public and private entities will be naturally multidisciplinary and multi-institutional and will: (a) promote, through domain-specific challenges, the culture of open science and multidisciplinary research applied to concrete problems of the real world, in strict cooperation with end users in engineering, science and humanities; (b) advance the state-of-the-art in geometry and material acquisition, geometry processing and semantic feature extraction, interactive visualization, computational fabrication, and high-bandwidth/3D display systems; (c) bridge complementary approaches for cost-effective data digitization, visualization, fabrication, and display through the integration of different methodologies in the 3D capture, processing and fabrication pipeline; (d) demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of scalable cost-effective end-to-end techniques to virtually and physically capture and create objects with complex shape and appearance; (e) increase awareness of the benefits of advanced visual/geometric computing technology in both professional and consumer domains.