We are incredibly proud to announce that Picaresque has been officially selected as a winner in the 2nd Open Call of the EU-funded VR Health Champions project. The selection process was highly competitive, with 74 applications submitted across 13 European countries. We are honored to be one of just 14 SMEs chosen to tackle specific industry challenges, representing the growing maturity, diversity, and potential of Europe’s XR healthcare ecosystem.

Over the coming year, Picaresque will be collaborating directly with dotLumen to enhance their environment awareness technology. Our shared goal is a profound one: to empower visually impaired individuals to navigate and walk safely and autonomously. By transitioning our proprietary Computer Vision technologies from smartphone-based capture to head-worn wearable implementations, we aim to deliver robust and highly responsive localization and navigation systems.

This project perfectly aligns with our strategic vision of bringing high-performance technology into practical, life-changing applications. We will be transferring our core competencies in ultra-optimized, real-time geometry processing, and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) algorithms—honed through years of commercial videogame development and our high-fidelity industrial digital twin platform, XRTwinScape. Because computation must be minimized on embedded devices to ensure all-day usability in real-world environments, our background in building efficient, low-power spatial representations is a critical asset to this challenge.

We extend a huge congratulations to the 13 other brilliant innovators selected alongside us. We are in fantastic company and cannot wait to see the collective impact we will make across the full XR lifecycle. We also want to thank the VR Health Champions team for trusting our vision and technical expertise. We are ready to get to work and help shape the future of digital health!