Grassroots Arts

Grassroots Arts and Research (GAR) is a Cologne-based research organisation and SME (UG), founded in 2009 as a spin-off of the Academy of Media Arts (KHM). GAR develops interactive artificial intelligence and extended reality (XR/AR) technologies, specialising in embodied AI — "Real-World Social and Physical AI" — in which a life-size AI character perceives a person's movement in real time, anticipates the next movement and responds with its own motion (leading, following, mirroring, synchronising). Core capabilities: real-time movement sensing and pose reconstruction, short-horizon motion prediction, generative and motion-matching agent motion, expressive AI avatars (gaze, gesture, speech), human–AI interaction and virtual worlds, running on-device on affordable consumer XR hardware. GAR applies these across immersive and creative media and, increasingly, digital health — home-based rehabilitation, cardiac rehabilitation, active and healthy ageing, and chronic-care support. Track record: EU projects AI4EU, AI4Media, ENFIELD and the EIC Pathfinder CAROUSEL ("AI for Extended Social Interaction"), plus the EIC BOOST project building an AI agent for physiotherapy; earlier Future-Internet projects FI-Content and Helios; named an EU Innovation Radar Key Innovator; healthcare prototype validated at TRL4. Women-led. GAR seeks as partner collaboration in consortia to integrate, pilot and validate its embodied-AI and XR technologies in health, rehabilitation, wellbeing and immersive-media applications.