From 6th till 9th May 2025, the INTERALPIN, the leading international trade fair for alpine technologies and a central meeting point for industry took place in Innsbruck, Austria. Partner Prinoth AG is one of the main exhibitors at the trade fair and enabled the consortium to demonstrate concepts of the snow grooming use case.
The demonstrator consisted of a complete snow groomer cabin, equipped with a selection of eXtended Reality technologies. Combined with a virtual world representing a skiing resort, the demonstrator provided people with the possibility to virtually drive a snow groomer through the environment. Additionally, the eXtended Reality technologies enabled users to see invisible information in their field-of-view, like skiers coming down the slopes in angles not visible to the users. Furthermore, laser projections within the environment, providing directions to the operators, potentially in difficult situations like e.g., dark nights, snowstorms, etc., to aid them in fulfilling their tasks or bringing them home safely. The demonstrator attracted a large crowd of people, not only snow groomer operators and technology developers, but also children, managers and general audience and we received very valuable and interesting feedback on our presented solutions. Statement varying from “This is such a cool solution!” up to “Why would I need this kind of technology?” highlighted the different approaches people currently have towards eXtended Reality solutions.
Additionally, our partners from University of Luxembourg and Hochschule der Medien used this possibility to interact with many operators of snow groomers. Not only did we collect feedback on the functionality of the eXtended Reality technologies, but we also focused on gathering input on social aspects, like usability, added-value and ethics on the usage of eXtended Reality in their daily job. The INTERALPIN trade fair has proven to be a huge source of knowledge, and we extensively interviewed a large collection of operators and received a large amount of feedback also on our social and ethical research topics.
It was very impressive to see that so many people were interested in our project results and wanted to experience our demonstrator, resulting in many people queuing for almost half an hour to finally test it. Each feedback is a valuable asset for the continuous development within the project.
Finally, a huge thanks goes out in the first place to Prinoth AG, for offering the THEIA-XR consortium the possibility to demonstrate these results at such an amazing trade fair and getting us in contact with so many high qualified people that have contributed to our research. Secondly, many thanks go out to the partners Technical University of Dresden, Technical University Graz, TTControl GmbH, Haption, Creanex, University of Luxembourg and Hochschule der Medien who have worked very hard in cooperation with Prinoth to make this demonstrator a reality. This excellent collaboration is required to make projects like THEIA-XR a huge success!
