The impact of technology in the world's panorama is at an all-time high. Advanced media applications enabling immersive communication are becoming ubiquitous in our lives, and there is a global trend to adopt virtual solutions to support day-to-day business operations, social events, and general lifestyle. A subset of these innovative media applications includes Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Holography, but they do not come without their share of challenges and requirements. To enable a satisfactory user experience, the requirements for the computing platform and its underlying network can be considered extreme and far from what can be attainable today. Hence, we propose a Cloud for Holography and Cross Reality (CHARITY), which is a complete framework that attempts to overcome the challenges and meet the requirements of such applications. CHARITY leverages an innovative cloud architecture that exploits edge solutions, a computing and network continuum autonomous orchestration, application-driven interfacing, mechanisms for smart, adaptive and efficient resource management, strong community involvement, and overreaching compatibility with all infrastructure vendors. This integrated framework will be put into test in a broad diversity of use cases targeted at advanced media applications, such as holographic events, virtual reality training, and mixed reality entertainment. CHARITY expects to deliver a working prototype, validated by the most demanding applications, capable of being demonstrated at dissemination events and exploited by a large community of users and companies outside the consortium, paving the way to the mass adoption of more advanced media applications in the market.

There is an increasing number of signs that the edge computing concept is going to play a dominant role in the forthcoming technology developments, disrupting economies at a large scale. The big cloud providers promptly jumped in to get the lion’s share but edge computing is intrinsically more “democratic” than cloud computing. In fact, its distributed and localized nature can be an antibody for big trusts, if properly exploited. Synergistically employing edge computing with upcoming technologies such as 5G provides an opportunity for EU to capitalize on its local resource and infrastructure and its SME-dominated application development landscape and achieve an edge-computing-driven disruption with a local business scope. To this end, ACCORDION establishes an opportunistic approach in bringing together edge resource/infrastructures (public clouds, on-premise infrastructures, telco resources, even end-devices) in pools defined in terms of latency, that can support NextGen application requirements. To mitigate the expectation that these pools will be “sparse”, providing low availability guarantees, ACCORDION will intelligently orchestrate the compute & network continuum formed between edge and public clouds, using the latter as a capacitor. Deployment decisions will be taken also based on privacy, security, cost, time and resource type criteria. The slow adoption rate of novel technological concepts from the EU SMEs will be tackled though an application framework, that will leverage DevOps and SecOps to facilitate the transition to the ACCORDION system. With a strong emphasis on European edge computing efforts (MEC, OSM) and 3 highly anticipated NextGen applications on collaborative VR, multiplayer mobile- and cloud-gaming, brought by the involved end users, ACCORDION is expecting to radically impact the application development and deployment landscape, also directing part of the related revenue from non-EU vendors to EU-local infrastructure and application providers.