Latvia

Latvia is classified as an Emerging Innovator, performing at 53.6% of the EU average in 2024—above the Emerging Innovators’ average of 48%. Key strengths include a well-educated population, trademark applications, and public-private co-publications. In recent years, Latvia has made strong progress in job-to-job mobility in science and technology, environment-related technologies, and lifelong learning participation (source: European Innovation Scoreboard 2024, Country Profile, Latvia)

In Latvia VR Health Champions together with its partners University of Latvia and Lightspace drive technological advancements in VR/AR healthcare solutions by fostering collaboration between start-ups, researchers, and industry leaders by promoting knowledge-intensive bioeconomy, biomedicine, medical technologies and bio-pharmacy as well as smart materials, technologies and engineering systems, smart energy and mobility, and information and communication technologies. 

Partners and enablers in the region in this project: 

The University of Latvia (UL) is a university of science of a high international standing. The UL creates an interdisciplinary, open and excellent innovation-oriented work and study environment.  

Lightspace is a Latvian company developing innovative multifocal near-eye displays – a unique human-centric 3D visualisation hardware together with supporting software, to create customised AR-enabled solutions in healthcare. 

Lightspace have solved the long-standing issue of eye vergence-accommodation conflict and focal rivalry, which are essential cornerstones for comfortable and safe optically transparent Augmented Reality.  

Innovation and day-to-day research and development actions are preformed entirely locally by a diverse team of professionals in all the core domains of electronics, optics, mechanical design, prototyping as well as software and firmware development   

The focus of Lightspace is to provide a safe and comfortable visualization tool within the healthcare sector.