The 3DLife consortium partners are committed to the establishment of a sustainable Virtual Centre of Excellence.

Through the Industrial Advisory Board, the VCE will become connected with the industrial world and thus continuously aware of the market needs and perspectives regarding new technologies, user needs and applications.

Regarding scientific impact, the VCE will endeavor to secure a dominant role in other well-established scientific bodies, as IEEE Technical Committees, IET professional networks and EURASIP special interest groups. Several dissemination forums, standardization bodies, international conferences and exhibitions will be targeted and used to cement the ties between the VCE and the broad research community. The aim is not only to strengthen the scientific impact of the VCE but also to steer and organise top-ranked conferences and symposia in media Internet.

Next to the impact outwards, the VCE will also have a substantial impact inwards, by fostering links to national research clusters. The integration efforts started during the NoE funding period will continue and lead to more integration and re-balancing of strategic research agendas across national networks, and thus to even more momentum for moving towards new research challenges.

The VCE will also contribute to dissemination by issuing training material and tutorials on key topics. That material will be combined into coherent courses targeting chosen topics to be offered at different locations in Europe. The NoE and the corresponding VCE intends to use this material to prepare a joint distance learning course that will be linked into Masters courses at many of the contributing universities when the project is finished. A thematic book to support distance learning will be published at the end of the funding period.

Moreover, other expected impacts of the 3DLife Network of Excellence and the respective VCE include:

• Reinforced positioning of industry in Europe in networking and delivery of multimedia content and services, in media Internet technologies. Strengthened European industry in multimedia experiences beyond HDTV and in electronic cinema.
• Wider uptake of networked and collaborative platforms based on a ‘3D Media Internet’.
• Global standards and European IPRs reflecting federated and coherent roadmaps.
• Wider market opportunities, including for content-related SMEs, arising from innovative business and societal applications (e.g. games, entertainment, or education, culture, and service creations) based on novel networked media technologies and systems.