On June 11, 2026, we exhibited at the Innovationstag Mittelstand des BMWE (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy) in Berlin — a large, hands-on showcase where around 300 small and medium-sized enterprises and research institutions presented projects developed with BMWE innovation funding.
The event is deliberately built as “an exhibition to touch and participate in”: rather than static posters, exhibitors bring working prototypes that visitors can try out directly. For us, that meant packing up VR and AR hardware and bringing a piece of the lab to the capital.
What We Brought
Our booth featured VR and AR prototypes from ongoing lab projects that visitors could try hands-on. Among them was ARiadne, our augmented reality navigation app — itself developed with support from BMWE's innovation funding — which lets people find their way through unfamiliar spaces with AR cues overlaid directly onto their surroundings.
We also spoke about XRwise, a BMWE-funded knowledge network project that we contribute to, which builds a cross-reality platform connecting physical and virtual spaces for teaching and research across universities.
An Interview and a Day of Exchange
Beyond demonstrating our own work, we gave a short interview about applied XR research and used the day to walk the exhibition floor ourselves — talking to other exhibitors, comparing notes, and discovering projects from very different fields, all connected by the same question: how do you turn a good idea into something that actually works outside the lab.
The day closed with an awards ceremony recognizing outstanding ZIM-funded projects, presented by Parliamentary State Secretary Gitta Connemann — a reminder of the scale of Germany's Mittelstand innovation funding landscape, and of how many of these projects, like ours, started as a research question at a university.
Why National Visibility Matters for Regional Research
Our lab is rooted in South Westphalia, and most of our field work happens close to home — in schools, clinics, and city labs across the region. Events like the Innovationstag Mittelstand are different: they place regional applied research directly alongside national innovation policy, funders, and hundreds of other Mittelstand projects.
That visibility matters. Funding programs like BMWE's IGP and ZIM are exactly the mechanisms that let prototypes like ARiadne and XRwise move from research demonstrators toward real-world deployment — and days like this one are where that connection becomes tangible.
Berlin, and Back to the Lab
It was a full day of demonstrations, conversations, and comparing our prototypes against a very different measuring stick than we usually use — the reactions of visitors who had never tried VR or AR before.
We're grateful to the BMWE and AiF Projekt GmbH for hosting the event, and we're already looking forward to the next opportunity to bring the lab on the road.
First published on the Immersive Reality Lab blog.