Finnish Research Impact Foundation enables a partnership between Roope Raisamo and Nokia Technologies Oy
At its meeting on 17 November 2023, the Board of the Finnish Research Impact Foundation selected three new professors as recipients of the TIA Professorship resources. The funding was granted to Professor Antti Poso from the University of Eastern Finland for drug design, Research Professor Ari Väänänen from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, and Professor of Computer Science Roope Raisamo from Tampere University.
Raisamo’s project Haptic Augmentation in Industrial Metaverses received €169,715. Raisamo’s business cooperation partner is Nokia Technologies Oy. The project will explore ways of introducing the sense of touch into the metaverse. The metaverse is a group of virtual spaces where people can meet without being in the same place physically.
The plan is to develop methods to code and transfer haptic sensing and technologies that use it. The aim is also to define the requirements of using haptics in multi-sensory industrial metaverse environments.
For Raisamo, the TIA Professor funding opens new kinds of opportunities for conducting research and implementing the results.
“Nokia Technologies is a leader in building metaverse infrastructures. With the help of our partnership, I will be able to direct research-based expertise to support the standardisation of media technology,” Raisamo says.
The results of the project provide new information for the development of the metaverse not only for the partner company, but also for the needs of other industries. The information generated in the project will serve as a basis for developing services that utilise the metaverse and thus it will benefit society at large.
“The standardisation work carried out in the project enables different devices and services to work well together. The practical applications may be related to, for example, telemedicine, new forms of working that do not require a specific location, and encounters between people through technology,” Raisamo says.
A TIA Professor spends some twelve months in the business partner’s facilities during the funding period. The funding may be spread out over a maximum of three years. The purpose of the funding scheme is to support collaborations between industry and research organisations and to give professors first-hand knowledge about relevant areas of research that industries are interested in. The projects may involve joint pre-competition research and other support activities.
Read FRIF’s news bulletin on its website.
Read more about the funded projects on the Finnish Research Impact Foundation website.
The Government of Finland set up the Finnish Research Impact Foundation in 2019. The Foundation works to promote industry-academia cooperation from the academic research perspective.
