In the COHERENT project, six leading European organisations provide complementary competencies to create a new networked holographic audio-visual platform to support real-time collaborative 3D interaction between geographically distributed teams. The display component will be based on innovative holographic techniques that can present, at natural human interaction scale, realistic animated 3D images to an unlimited number of freely moving simultaneous viewers. The design of the basic networked audiovisual components will be driven by two innovative demanding applications - a collaborative medical visualisation system and a collaborative design review system for the automotive industry - that will constitute by themselves an advancement of the state of the art in their specific domains. Both applications will provide intuitive access and interaction with shared 3D models through a sensory rich 3D user interface based on non-intrusive wireless interaction devices and offering 3D audio cues.