On July 29th, 2026 we attended the WorldS4 Conference in London and presented our paper Building Immersive Digital Twins: An Empirical Stakeholder Study of Barriers and Open Source Building Blocks in the European AR, VR, and IoT Ecosystem. WorldS4 brings together international experts from technology, science and business to explore advances in digital systems that support sustainable transformation.

The conference is organized across four tracks, ranging from digital infrastructure and computational systems to applications in government and engineering. Our paper contributed to Track 1: Infrastructure and Computation and addressed the critical question: Why do so many Digital Twin initiatives deliver promising results in the pilot phase - but fail to scale in production environments? We approached this question by conducting a series of stakeholder interviews with representatives from industry, academia, and technology providers. The findings identified interoperability and content creation as the most significant challenges to large-scale adoption. The research also examined the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in immersive Digital Twins, from content generation and data integration to autonomous runtime support. To widen AI-adoption in system-critical roles, participants highlighted trust, transparency, and explainability as essential prerequisites.

In response to the barriers identified through the study, the paper presents a set of reusable open-source building blocks developed within the Immersive Data Center Management (IDCM) project. The proposed components include interoperability layers, CAD-to-XR conversion toolchains, and open AI agent runtimes. The modular architecture enables the integration of Digital Twin capabilities across heterogeneous infrastructures, reduces external dependencies, and accelerates the development of scalable solutions.

By addressing key challenges in the cloud-edge ecosystem, this work supports ApeiroRA's strategic objective of creating open, interoperable, and sovereign digital foundations for the seamless deployment of next-generation immersive applications.

The paper will subsequently be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems (LNNS).