Multimodal digital media, across video, text, image, speech and Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) content, are rapidly reshaping our working and living environments. Seamlessly blending digital media and interaction within the physical world offers disruptive potential to enhance our effectiveness, efficiency and quality of engagement in everyday life.

The SFI Centre for Research Training in Digitally-Enhanced Reality (d-real) is an innovative, industry partnered, research training programme that equips PhD students with deep ICT knowledge and skills across Digital Platform Technology, Content and Media Technology and their application in Industry sectors. d-real postgraduate students will make research breakthroughs in areas such as multimodal interaction, multimodal digital assistants, multilingual speech processing, real-time multilingual translation and interaction, machine intelligence for video analytics and multimodal personalisation and agency.

Whether via multimodal devices such as smart phones, embedded displays and IoT, or virtual assistants and VR/AR experiences, media technology is revolutionising the way we interact, collaborate and behave. d-real PhD students will develop skills for next generation human-centric media technology, including:

  • machine intelligence-based sensing and understanding of digital content and information;
  • its transformation and personalisation;
  • its multimodal interaction and delivery via speech, text, video, image and VR/AR; and
  • its impactful application in multiple industry and societal settings.

We have five cohorts on the programme, with intakes in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. We have completed recruitment on d-real so there will be no further roles advertised.

d-real have five intakes of 20-30 PhD students. There are 119 students, who are being trained as world-class researchers through the SFI Centre for Research Training in Digitally-Enhanced Reality (d-real).

  • Trinity College Dublin (TCD; host)
  • Dublin City University (DCU)
  • Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin, formerly DIT)
  • University College Dublin (UCD)
  • University of Galway (UoG, formerly National University of Ireland, Galway)

d-real is funded by Research Ireland (formerly Science Foundation Ireland), by the contributions of industry and academic partners. d-real is also supported by the ADAPT SFI Research Centre. Details of the d-real Leadership Team are available here.

More information about the Training Programme is available here