Project co-financed by the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy that develops an immersive platform for student guidance. It uses 5G and machine learning technologies to support informed educational choices.
ITAVER5O is a technological experimentation project co-financed by the Ministry of Enterprises and Made in Italy (MIMIT) as part of the public notice of March 17, 2023 dedicated to research and experimentation projects on 5G technologies. This project aimed to design, develop and validate an immersive platform for educational guidance, specifically to support high school students in choosing their post-diploma studies path, through interactive experiences capable of highlighting individual interests, aptitudes and potential.
Validate an immersive education model based on virtual environments and interactive content designed to foster student engagement.
Develop machine learning models for behavioral and curricular profiling of users, based on interaction data analysis.
Evaluate the enabling role of 5G technology in the delivery of immersive and data-intensive content.
This was ensured by the Institute for Educational Technology of the National Research Council (CNR-ITD, project lead), the University of Tor Vergata and SATIS - Clinical Psychology Center, with technological-pedagogical and psychological profiling expertise. Hypex, Digivox and Prodea handled the design and development of the experiential component; Capgemini contributed to machine learning and system integration. A total of eight partners, including Fastweb + Vodafone.
The environments are organized around the three main scientific domains identified by the European Research Council (ERC) – social sciences and humanities, mathematical and technological sciences and life sciences – and allow students to freely explore content and activities. During the experience, a self-adaptive machine learning algorithm analyzes user behavior and generates personalized feedback on educational orientation.
From a technological-architectural point of view, the platform was created in two infrastructural configurations: one residing on Public Cloud and one hosted on a proprietary Edge Cloud environment of Fastweb + Vodafone, the so-called MEC (Multi-access Edge Computing) integrated with a 5G private mobile network (MPN) of the operator.
The combination of 5G, Edge Computing and immersive environments has demonstrated significant advantages in terms of quality and fluidity of the experience, primarily the ability to use a virtual reality (VR) headset which clearly brings the dimension of immersivity. But also the mobile fruition of 4K content, difficult to support in scenarios based exclusively on centralized cloud infrastructures and best-effort connectivity.
Ultra fast connectivity.
Protected infrastructures.
Multi-access Edge Computing integrated with mobile network.
Proprietary environment of Fastweb + Vodafone.
In fact, the MEC architecture allows computational capacity to be brought closer to final users, reducing response times and significantly improving the quality of the immersive experience. Thanks to 5G connectivity, it was possible to support the simultaneous transmission of ultra-high resolution stereoscopic video streams, with quality higher than 4K and latency lower than approximately 45 milliseconds, a value necessary to guarantee fluid fruition through virtual reality headsets.
