The XR, AR or VR products or services with the most imagination and/or technological excellence given a specific challenge
Awards
Because we are redefining the future of storytelling through emerging technology and showcasing the superpowers of immersive storytelling: that it allows everyone to experience new worlds, especially ones that are created by women and people of colour; and those worlds can orient us all towards interconnected and intercultural futures.
brighter AI’s Deep Natural Anonymization (DNAT) is a generative AI-based solution. It automatically detects personal identifiers, such as faces and license plates, and generates a synthetic replacement that reflects the attributes of the original data. DNAT protects identities while keeping high data quality for analytics or machine learning.
The XR, AR or VR products or services with the most imagination and/or technological excellence given a specific challenge
The XR, AR or VR products or services with the most ingenuity, vision or artistry
The XR, AR or VR products or services that allow users to experience stories in a new, inclusive and immersive way
The XR, AR or VR products or services with the most meaningful social or individual impact
The XR, AR or VR products or services that give users the most innovative or unique interactive experience
AUREA is a global competition to identify excellence in augmented, virtual or mixed reality. These five awards seek to not only identify the best products and services but demonstrate the potential of this sector for technology and entertainment as a whole.
Our Jury changes every year. One of the Jury seats is reserved for an outstanding winner from the previous year. This year, Laura Bücheler, winner of last year's interaction award, joins our Jury.
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Jury-Chair
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Team Manager Virtual Film Production ICT AG
Bio
Born in Belgium, Frank Govaere studied film and animation at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium and was a master student of Raoul Servais, one of the founding fathers of European animation. He graduated as Master of Fine Arts.
Frank has worked with leading media companies in Europe and Asia, specializing mainly in the realization of large media productions.
He started his career in traditional animation working on Feature Films and TV-Series and became one of the pioneers of digitizing 2D-Animation workflows and extended his skills into 3D Animation and VFX. As Animation Director, Producer and VFX-Supervisor, his focus has been on technically challenging productions.
Frank currently heads the VFX-Unit at UFA Serial Drama and is a driving force behind UFA’s endeavours in VR/AR/XR -specifically in regard to the creative and technical development of Volumetric Film.
Jury-Member
Co-Founder & CEO, VR Coaster
Bio
Thomas Wagner is Co-Founder and CEO of VR Coaster, the worldwide leading company for Virtual Reality experiences on ride attractions. He is also Professor for Virtual Design at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern. Working in the Media and Games Industry for over 20 years now, Wagner has won several international Awards for Excellence in Game-, 3D- and Mobile App Design, including two Adobe Max Awards, multiple iTunes featured apps as well as the iTunes „Best of“ Selection. He is the inventor of the wireless VR Coaster System that changed the Theme Park Industry with over 60 installations on roller coasters and drop towers all over the world.
Jury-Chair
Experience Strategist, The Collaboratorium
Bio
Kathleen Cohen is an Experience Strategist focusing on building innovative and engaging, even hyper reality visitor experiences utilizing immersive & disruptive tech platforms, storytelling, AI, data, and creative thinking. After a longstanding multi-platform career envisioning & building video games, web content, animations, mobile and wearable products for DreamWorks Interactive, IBM Innovation and Disney Worldwide Parks and Resorts, Cohen formed The Collaboratorium consultancy. The Collaboratorium is now an XR consortium focusing on engaging experiences for themed attractions, location based entertainment, family entertainment centers and the public streetscape. Think of the Collaboratorium as both interpreters and general contractors of where the physical meets the virtual world by integrating a new reality, while sitting at the cross section of imagination, product development and visitor experience.
Jury-Member
CIO at Feelbelt, Co-Founder and Managing Director, GHOST & AUREA#4 Winner
Bio
Laura is above all else highly intrinsically motivated to get things done and change the world for the better one step at a time. With an academic background in Biomedical Engineering, a professional background in Product and Entrepreneurship, and a lifelong learning attitude (which lead her to complete several Machine Learning and Data Science educational programs) she is highly skilled to find solutions for new and exciting challenges.
She thrives in the sweet spot between Tech and Business which, in combination with her user-centric mindset, makes her a great product strategist. Her belief is that if you want to build a strong product, you need to start with the user/customer. Only when you listen and observe them, will you be able to create a truly useful product.
Laura Co-Founded the startup GHOST - feel it in the Haptic Feedback space. They grew the company, pivoted according to the internal and external factors, won several awards from the 2022 AUREA Interaction Award to the 2019 Porsche Next OI Challange, built a SaaS Software and business model successfully acquired customers such as Mercedes-Benz and Porsche and finally sold the company in 2022.
In her capacity as CEO and Founder of GHOST - feel it, she was building the bridge between the technical team and their customer, as well as developing business strategies, product roadmaps, financial charts and using agile methods to keep the team focused on the main priorities and see them through.
She also loves to give back and has been active in a variety of social situations from teaching German to refugees, joining Engineers without Boarders as a STEM Ambassator, acted as a Mentor in the #WeVsVirus Hackathon and the LeadersAward.
Jury-Member
President Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW) e. V.
Bio
Delivery focussed and results-oriented Leader and passionate Entrepreneur who enjoys success by exploring converging industries like Advertising, Mobile Communication and Internet in Europe and the US. Pioneering technology and pushing innovation introducing effective marketing methodologies and planning executable and scalable strategy while championing and leading business development in challenging – and sometimes stressful – settings and dynamic fast growing markets.
Calls upon familiarisation with the commercial challenges faced by senior leaders, coupled with exposure to: technological evolution, business transformation and development and performance improvement, underpinned by an academic background in economics and substantial experience as business angel.
Performed results oriented leadership of cross-cultural and cross-functional teams, analysed and implemented state of the art technologies resulting in new markets and scalable businesses. Acquainted with supervisory roles. Proven in due diligence processes and critical path analysis with agendas in integration and joint operations.
Koliseum is born out of the desire to make Virtual Reality entertainment accessible to the broad public and to promote experiences that create and enhance human interactions. Koliseum’s main activity is the development of a multiplayer platform or table, designed to bring a warm, collective and bonding experience to VR, as well as VR video games, specially developed for the above-mentioned platform.
Based on one of the 20th century’s most popular games, the game “Koliseum Soccer VR” transforms Foosball – Table Soccer – into an exhilarating experience, adding surprising actions, emotions, tensions, and twists. The game is particularly unique as far as mixed reality content goes and is perfectly suited for showcasing how elevated social games become with an upgrade to 3D. www.koliseum.com
Meet the Miner – WDR VR Bergwerk is an interactive VR experience for Oculus Rift where users can experience how dangerous the life of a miner was 100 years ago. Feel how it was to race down hundreds of meters into the earth
in a shaky elevator. Use two hands to mine coal out of the coal bed with a virtual pickaxe and shovel it into the coal cart. Are you brave enough to face the danger that lies deep beneath the surface like they did? See for yourself and meet the miner!
Eclipse is an immersive hyper-reality experience, a glimpse of tomorrow's cinema. As part of a rescue team, you're sent in space to investigate the disappearance of a spaceship called Eclipse. Contrary to most VR experiences dedicated to entertainment, Eclipse is not based on shooting. It's a 4 players Sci-Fi interactive short movie that lasts around 40 minutes, enhanced by physical effects, full body awareness and total freedom of movements.
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augmen.tv is the AR lens for any video. By using our technology, any video content can be overlaid with an augmented reality layer to create more immersive and interactive experiences. This could be applied also in cinemas, planetariums and other venues such as theme parks. Visitors can engage with the content and immerse themselves in a new way. The theme parks and cinemas can monetize by providing these experiences to the visitors. Our technology works on any device (smartphone, tablet or wearables, such as AR Headsets), so it can be made available even on the visitor’s device. Our software-based technology has been used by TV networks such as ProSieben (in Germany) and Nickelodeon (US). |
The Augmented Reality App Tunnel AR by Hamburg-based headraft takes the user on a literally groundbreaking journey through one of latest singles the most successful German Hip-Hop Band 'Die Fantastischen Vier': Tunnel. We take music experience to the next level by producing an AR app that offers fans the possibility to go on an augmented and interactive journey with the band instead of being a passive spectator, literally digging a tunnel through different layers of an imaginary story world. Through gamification the users explore worlds built from real life elements from the band’s almost 30-year history, creating a stronger and more intimate connection between fans and band. The actual music video was then shot within the app and only enriched with traditional content. Combining the app with the more traditional video allows for a new level of interaction between fans and the band.
DNABlock is creating a simple and easy way to manage and license your digital-likeness in the new virtual world. DNABlock is shaping the industry by creating a uniform avatar format supported by an open source blockchain protocol that establishes new ethical standards and licensing protocols that protect the usage of digital avatars. Additionally, DNABlock is creating a mobile scanning solution that would allow for deployment of these avatars at scale.
A’s Volumetric Film - 'An Entire Lifetime' is a VR experience that combines human holograms and a virtual environment with a full-fledged storyline. The VR experience EIN GANZES LEBEN ('An Entire Lifetime') follows an actress named Maria as she goes on a journey through the history of German film – from a silent film scene right up to the present day. It is the first 'walkable movie' that premiered in Germany.
For the September 2018 opening of the Deutsche Bank’s new Kulturforum in Berlin, the PalaisPopulaire, … and dos Santos created an augmented reality experience for iOS and Android that takes visitors on a journey through time. With the PalaisPopulaire TimeMachine mobile app, users can view 3D models of the palace and — with accompanying info-texts and images on interactive 3D billboards — discover the palace’s rich history throughout the years.
With the Group-Reactive VR Cinema the Animationsinstitut presents a state-of-the-art extension to multi-user synchronized VR by combining linear films with game-like interaction. A synchronized VR cinema allows the presentation of linear VR content for a large audience in one room at the same time. The users share their experience with their seatmates while profiting from a time-synced centralized high quality sound playback.
The innate desire for exploration inevitably brings risks. Today, we are again on a journey to explore how disruptive technologies and innovation will change the future of living, an attitude that is communicated through the Global Allianz Explorer Program (e.g. via crowd-generated content platforms). A breathtaking full body virtual reality experience using Birdly® technology, developed together with the agency Willie Beamen, makes it possible to engage visitors at a physical event while still telling the Explorer Story.
Walk-in movies and interactive stories are now expanding our reality and bringing completely new forms of storytelling. The viewer is free to move around actors as they dynamically integrate into foreign environments. This requires new methods for the digitization of actors, which now exist for the first time by using our volumetric recording technologies.
Volucap is a world leading volumetric video and 3D capture studio creating realistic human performance for immersive media.
The new studio is available for professional commissioned productions and with its application possibilities in the areas of virtual and augmented reality is extremely interesting not only for digital media, but also for medical technology and industrial applications such as industry 4.0 or construction 4.0, as well as e-learning.
German startup holoride creates a new media category for passengers in cars. Its software reads vehicle data (IoT) and uses it in an intelligent way (AI) to create virtual worlds (VR) in real-time. The physical feedback from the car creates hyper-immersive experiences with the power to change in-car entertainment forever.
Experience history in a real historical location with Microsoft HoloLens headset. Walk in colonel's Rol Command Post back in 1944, 100 ft below the surface of Paris during World War 2 as a journalist. Learn important facts about how the French Interior Force (FFI) helped the allies free Paris of the nazis. Meet members of the resistance and discover how they lived.
Up to 10 visitors visit the CP with HoloLens on their head for 25 minutes. The location is 5300 sq.ft. size and a virtual soldier walks them through the different rooms and present them 5 differents characters during the visit.
"Insurrection 1944" (#insurrection1944) just won the "Grand Prix AR 2019" Award of 360° Film Festival in Paris.
HOLOGATE BLITZ is a premium motion simulator platform, fully optimized for flying, racing, and even underwater VR experiences. ‘BLITZ’ will offer a motion sickness-free experience due to its extremely low latency and proprietary network and code design. It features a practically noiseless belt driven piston system, which can lift almost a full meter in height and can tilt ±30° in every direction. Additionally, it comes with a futuristically-styled steering wheel that can be switched from one- axis to two-axis control, offering players a wider range of game possibilities.
Whether it’s piloting a space ship in an epic space battle or speeding through another dimension in a futuristic racer, the ‘BLITZ’ is built to support the ideas that come from limitless expanse of the VR creator’s mind!
ARCADRONE is the first attraction of Drone Interactive: It allows up to 4 players to fly drones in a 50 m² arena in intense games of a few minutes. Thanks to a proprietary real-virtual interaction engine, the drones interact with each other and with the virtual elements of the video game in mixed reality. For the same attraction, different games with different gameplays can be proposed to renew the experiences and adapt to the customer universe.
ARCADRONE was designed to maximize the thrill of the experience from player’s and spectator’s point of view. Each game becomes an intense show made of drones, lights, sounds and player skills: Everything is ready for esport competition!
To summarize, ARCADRONE is the world-first drone-based attraction, that allows innovative AR multiplayer experience.
Bookful is a mobile app for kids that uses augmented reality to bring books to life. Choose from an extensive library of AR books featuring the best publishers and brands, including Penguin Random House, Charlesbridge and Hasbro. The books range from classics such as Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit to popular characters including My Little Pony and Transformers.
Launched in November 2018 by Inception XR, Bookful is an incredibly powerful reading tool that helps children understand content in a visual and fun manner. To date, nearly 100,000 people have tried Bookful. Kids read on average 7 books a month – this amounts to valuable reading time amidst the numerous digital distractions today. The app encourages users to cultivate a strong reading habit over time.
Space Walk VR is young german VR startup from Hamburg, founded 2019, that wants to remove physical boundaries of virtual worlds. They develop redirected walking technology which creates the illusion to explore infinitely large worlds by natural walking in a confined tracking space. This is achieved by introducing a gap between physical and virtual movements that is not noticed by the user when it is kept below perceptual detection thresholds. The technology is based on more than 4 years of research at the University of Hamburg, that was conducted by one of our co-founders in the course of his PhD studies. In contrast to other redirected walking approaches (e.g. by Institute of Creative Technologies or University of Tokyo), they developed solutions which work in room-scale VR (up to 4x4 m) without disturbing the flow of the experience. For this, redirection techniques are integrated with narration and gameplay directly into the virtual environment.
Mona Lisa: Beyond the Glass is the first virtual reality (VR) experience presented by Musée du Louvre. On view from October 24, 2019 to February 24, 2020 in the Napoléon Hall, this VR experience is an integral component of the museum’s landmark Leonardo da Vinci exhibition, which commemorates the 500th anniversary of da Vinci’s death in France.
Unique graphics and the lovely storytelling of HUXLEY 2 electrifies the players from the first second. Not many VR Escape Games offer a 44 minutes game time experience full of content and magic moments. Also, HUXLEY 2 places great value on realistic and atmospheric sound environment. Besides that, the puzzles are funny, intelligent and creative, but not too difficult, so everyone can enjoy the game. It is a multiplayer game, so you share your VR experience with friends and family and work together as a team. You interact with every group member who gets their avatar. To make the game as realistic as possible it was designed without teleportation and is wirelessly playable. The players should feel free to discover the virtual environment in fully realistic movements and interactive actions.
ManoMotion is in the forefront of hand gesture control, making your actual hand an interaction tool to control technology. Our vision is that every person on the Earth will be using their hands to control technology.
It has a broad application space in combination with smartphones, AR/VR glasses, game consoles and a vast amount of industrial systems.
We have a proven market attraction with early paying customers, large interest from leading tech companies and a waiting list of developers.
The solution is a scalable software toolkit enabling quick customer take-up, smooth distribution and feature based pricing.
We have a world-class team with experienced senior management and leading researchers in Computer Vision and AI and a proprietary solution with strong patent.
Feelbelt GmbH is a media tech start-up from Potsdam Babelsberg and was founded in 2019. Feelbelt makes sound perceptible: all frequencies in the range from 1 to 20,000 Hz are converted into haptic feedback and transmitted to the body through pulse generators. In this way, a new dimension of perception is integrated into the entertainment experience: the sense of touch. Production takes place at local partners in Berlin and Brandenburg. For every Feelbelt sold, the company plants an oak tree.
ARTHELPS is an initiative of creative people and artists that helps in a very special way, namely with art. For ARTHELPS creativity is the most important tool, the engine and the universal language. As a non-profit art initiative, ARTHELPS can not only reach people themselves, but also build bridges between different social classes.
Nine years of war in Syria has destroyed places of culture, economy and faith and left a whole society devastated. Considered lost, they are still alive in people’s memories. The idea: a virtual 360 ° restoration of people’s pre-war memories using Instagram photos.
There are rebuilt three damaged environments in Aleppo as VR views, created as a collective memory via photogrammetry and machine learning. It involved mining thousands of Instagram posts via geotag variations in English, Arabic, and French. A pipeline rescaled and re-sorted the dataset via deep learning and used it for photogrammetry.
Adventure Lab is building the platform for the future of live entertainment. We connect audiences with live hosted, interactive adventures that can be experienced from tablet, desktop, or VR. We are creating a new gig economy marketplace for performers - enabling them to market and operate magical adventures from anywhere in the world. Our development partners will create the experiences our hosts bring to life. Our digital platform is both the box office and the cloud based venue; a global 24/7 digital entertainment hub.
Adventure Lab was founded by creative innovation leaders, magic makers, and veterans of Pixar, Google, Facebook, and Oculus Story Studio.
BRCvr, a recognized Universe of the Burning Man Multiverse and home to a virtual version of Black Rock City, is inclusive of its iconic art, camps, and most importantly, its citizens. BRCvr magically captures the same spirit, culture and principles of the real-world event in an interactive VR-first expression that cultivates conversation, connection and community, with over 150 worlds visited by over 12,000 uniques in VR.
Forerunner in the field of indoor leisure thanks to innovative immersive experiences, the Koezioindoor leisure network decided to integrate virtual reality into its offer. Koezio is getting closer to BackLight to create what will become a collaborative adventure that can be played by up to 5 players, full of humor and for all ages: IcecubeProtocol.
Pilgrimage is a location based collaborative augmented reality experience in which multiple 3D sculptures were located at different places all around the world. These sculptures could only be collected by going to these locations, which included the Museum of Modern Art NY, Christ the Redeemer Statue in Brazil, Louvre Paris and more. Although Pilgrimage is a permanent AR installation, the collection of the 3D sculptures saw extensive collaboration and coordination from people all over the world.
Faber Courtial brings together a team of specialised 3D artists, graphic designers and programmers. Both founders take care of the creative development and technical advancement of the company.
Brelyon creates ultra-immersive, large-format displays in a compact form factor. Using proprietary lightfield technology, the Brelyon device renders a virtual 10-foot screen without requiring the user to wear headgear.
The Dagger Of Time is a Virtual Reality Escape Game set in the world of Prince of Persia which enables you to experience time control. You will be able to experience something impossible in real life: to slow, stop or even rewind time!
The 2020 PhotoNOLA PhotoWALK presented by the New Orleans Photo Alliance and Metaculture brings the 15th annual celebration of photography in New Orleans to Virtual Reality. With a beautiful replica of the International House Hotel, PhotoNOLA's in-person home, and 17 gallery portals, the team was able to share present photography by over 40 participating artists to over 2300 viewers in one evening. The PhotoWALK serves to provide an opportunity for photographers to show and speak about their work with industry professionals and the New Orleans community in an intimate local setting. With the MetaCulture team, 70 artists and industry professionals were introduced to VR as a platform to share work. MetaCulture is a Black-owned virtual events business founded on the idea of increasing diversity in the metaspace. Currently housed on the social VR platform, Altspace, MetaCulture is positioned to change the way entertainment and art are presented and received. MetaCulture and the New Orleans Photo Alliance aim to use this platform to elevate underserved photographic voices in VR.
Tilt Five's AR Holographic Gaming System is designed to deliver spectacular, up-close gaming experiences. Whether playing with a group of friends around the dining room table or connecting with players around the world, they seek to bring tabletop games to life in ways that have never before been possible.
Like Photoshop, but for Haptics. Our Software allows anyone to design haptic feedback for improved HMI, without previous knowledge.
Ghost aims to help product developers integrate new channels of machine-human interaction into their products, whether that means enabling amputees feel their prosthesis, creating new senses, or enhancing learning processes. Their easy-to-use Haptic development software offers a whole suite of tools for designing complex patterns and prototyping haptic user experiences, without previous knowledge.
The sense of touch can be used for machines to interact with humans in order to avoid sensory overload or speed up learning processes. Ghost - feel it’s mission is to allow any company to create the best and most personalized haptic feedback to match their use case! One example is a haptic car seat with Mercedes-Benz, that can make you feel when to take the next turn.
Motivated by the urgent need for new approaches to cognitive therapy, OVR Technology is utilizing cutting-edge VR technology to deliver powerful real-world benefits. Their OVR Scent Device compliments VR headsets and virtual worlds by precisely emitting scents to offer a realistic sensory experience to users.
Founded by Anne-Sophie Panzer and Stefan Marx, ZAUBAR aims to make travel possible by using the latest AI technology to transform old memories into virtual experiences. Their all-in-one platform enables passionate locals to create, host, and monetize immersive tours with augmented reality.
About Aesir
Aesir Interactive is a renowned development studio based in Munich, Germany. A passionate team of more than 40 highly skilled designers, artists and programmers lay the foundation for captivating games and innovative interactive applications. We develop several different games, VR and AR projects for PC, Xbox One, Playstation4 and Switch at once.
About the project
The Virtual Reality Bodyflying Xperience is a development in state-of-the-art free-roam technology in 6-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF). The user experiences a skydiving base jump from the cliff in Lauterbrunnen Valley – a famous base jump top spot in Switzerland. For this purpose, a realistic replica was programmed. Due to the modern tracking, the participant moves completely freely in the pre-chamber in the virtual space and enjoy the view, before he jumps from the ramp at a height of 780 m into the Lauterbrunnen Valley.
The experience is hyper realistic due to the wind speeds in the wind tunnel. Before his flight, the participant feels real objects that are depicted in virtuality. Professional flyers can also move with high speed in all dimensions thanks to specially programmed orientation aids.
VRrOOm offers social XR production services to bring performing arts into creative virtual worlds with the will to reach audiences across all media: from headsets to PCs, from smartphones to TV or radio stations, everyone can enjoy the show!
VRrOOm is an internationally recognized brand, with clients and partners on several continents, and is recognized worldwide as a leader in the creation of social XR worlds hosting live events thanks to its expertise in this field. From the creation and design of virtual worlds hosting shows or exhibitions allowing the public to meet and interact in the form of avatars, to their production and broadcasting on all types of formats (VR, PC, online, TV, radio etc.) in order to reach the greatest number of people through all available media
Connecting people within virtual space is at the heart of everything JOURNEE does. With Joytopia, the BMW Metaverse, they tell the story of a sustainable, circular future as part of an immersive experience in a gamified and interactive digital environment.
Like Photoshop, but for Haptics. Our Software allows anyone to design haptic feedback for improved HMI, without previous knowledge.
Ghost aims to help product developers integrate new channels of machine-human interaction into their products, whether that means enabling amputees feel their prosthesis, creating new senses, or enhancing learning processes. Their easy-to-use Haptic development software offers a whole suite of tools for designing complex patterns and prototyping haptic user experiences, without previous knowledge.
The sense of touch can be used for machines to interact with humans in order to avoid sensory overload or speed up learning processes. Ghost - feel it’s mission is to allow any company to create the best and most personalized haptic feedback to match their use case! One example is a haptic car seat with Mercedes-Benz, that can make you feel when to take the next turn.
Tilt Five's AR Holographic Gaming System is designed to deliver spectacular, up-close gaming experiences. Whether playing with a group of friends around the dining room table or connecting with players around the world, they seek to bring tabletop games to life in ways that have never before been possible.
Motivated by the urgent need for new approaches to cognitive therapy, OVR Technology is utilizing cutting-edge VR technology to deliver powerful real-world benefits. Their OVR Scent Device compliments VR headsets and virtual worlds by precisely emitting scents to offer a realistic sensory experience to users.
For over a decade, French studio Backlight has been pushing the boundaries of film and virtual experiences. Their project, Le Bal de Paris, is a multi-user live show in VR in which participants interact with dancers at a lavish ball. It's already been a hit, taking home the Best VR Experience award at the Venice Biennale!
