CONTINUUM is a 13.6M€ project coordinated by CNRS and funded by the Investments of the Future national program. The CONTINUUM project will create a collaborative research infrastructure of 30 platforms located throughout France, to advance interdisciplinary research based on interaction between computer science and the human and social sciences. Thanks to CONTINUUM, 37 research teams will develop cutting-edge research programs focusing on visualization, immersion, interaction and collaboration, as well as on human perception, cognition and behaviour in virtual/augmented reality.

CONTINUUM enables a paradigm shift in the way we perceive, interact, and collaborate with complex digital data and digital worlds by putting humans at the center of the data processing workflows. The project will empower scientists, engineers and industry users with a highly interconnected network of high-performance visualization and immersive platforms to observe, manipulate, understand and share digital data, real-time multi-scale simulations, and virtual or augmented experiences. All platforms will feature facilities for remote collaboration with other platforms, as well as mobile equipment that can be lent to users to facilitate onboarding.

CONTINUUM is organized along two axes:

1. Interdisciplinary research on interaction, based on collaborations between computer science and the humanities and social sciences, with the objective of increasing knowledge and solutions in human-centered computing by creating new services and expertise deployed across the network of heterogeneous platforms;
2. Deployment of tools and services to support the needs of many different scientific fields in accessing big data, simulations and the virtual/augmented experience (mathematics, physics, biology, engineering, computer science, medicine, psychology, didactics, history, archaeology, sociology, etc.)

The wide geographical coverage of the CONTINUUM network will enable the dissemination of know-how to the economic and social world, in collaboration with transfer-innovation stakeholders (SATT, Competitiveness Clusters, Carnot Institutes…). Specific business models will be developed so as to allow access to cutting-edge equipment and top-notch expertise by academics and private users. Thanks to CONTINUUM, French research teams will have the opportunity to take the lead in Europe, and possibly world-wide, on research in digital and immersive environments based on interconnected platforms offering a wide range of technologies and scientific expertise in a multidisciplinary and human-centered scientific framework.

CONTINUUM provides a key missing link between the current e-infrastructure of data centers, computing facilities and cloud services on the one hand, and human intelligence and expertise on the other.

We need collective human intelligence to harness the power of computation and tame the data deluge. More than just a “human in the loop”, we need humans in control, with the proper tools to exert this control. Like natural sciences, we need scientific instruments to observe hidden phenomena in large datasets, conduct experiments and make discoveries. CONTINUUM is a digital macroscope to explore the digital world.

By developing both the instrument itself and using it in a variety of application areas, CONTINUUM will foster interdisciplinary research to both better understand how to interact with the digital world and enable advances in other sciences and engineering fields.