On July 7 and 8, 2026, we took part in a two-day school event at Stadtlabor Soest, a shared space for civic and regional exchange in Soest. The event introduced students to the basics of immersive media and gave them a look into both our research and the Computer Visualization and Design (CVD) program at Hochschule Hamm-Lippstadt.
Rather than a lecture, the format was hands-on from the start: after a short introduction to what immersive media actually means and where it is used, students spent most of their time trying out VR and AR demonstrations on different devices.
Training for the Real World, in VR
One of the demonstrations was a VR application for wind turbine maintenance training — the same use case behind our CHI 2026 contribution “XR Training in Challenging Environments: The Wind Turbines Case”, which explores how XR training needs to account for confined spaces, physical strain, and team coordination, not just visual realism.
For the students, it was a chance to experience a safety-critical, hard-to-access work environment from a safe distance — a concrete example of why XR training matters beyond entertainment.
Navigating the Street with AR
The second demonstration used a smartphone-based AR app to guide students along a street, highlighting points of interest (POIs) in their surroundings as they walked — a hands-on illustration of the same principles behind our ARiadne project, which develops AR navigation for real urban environments.
Seeing wayfinding cues appear directly over the real street, rather than on a flat map, tends to be the moment where AR clicks for people who have never tried it before — and it was no different for this group.
Why We Show Up at Events Like This
Outreach events like this one are part of how we connect regional students with both immersive technology and the CVD program that trains the next generation of XR developers and designers at HSHL.
It's also useful for us: explaining our research to a non-specialist audience, in a short amount of time, is a good test of whether we actually understand why our work matters.
From the Lab to the Street
Two days, dozens of students, and two very different XR use cases — one underground in a wind turbine, one on the street outside — showed the same thing: immersive technology is easiest to understand once you've tried it yourself.
We'd like to thank Stadtlabor Soest for hosting us and look forward to more exchanges like this.
First published on the Immersive Reality Lab blog.