XR Day 2026 runs Friday, April 10, from 9:00 to 18:00 on the shared campus of Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and Akademie für Darstellende Kunst Baden-Württemberg. The day focuses on eXtended Reality as non-linear, user-controlled technology across film, theater, media, art, and industry. The format mixes impulse talks with hands-on experiences for VR, AR, and MR, with an explicit focus on where new application fields emerge.
Morning talks
A welcome at 9:00 sets the day with Volker Helzle, Ludger Engels, and Ilja Mirsky.
At 9:10, WHAT THE FOX puts participants into a nighttime city from the perspective of a red fox. The talk features Gaussian Splatting, with Alex Herrmann and Alec Barth from jyotifilm as speakers, focusing on interdisciplinary teamwork across art, science, and technology.
At 9:30, MAIA presents a 3D avatar linked to CyberLÄND. Frank Dürr from acameo and CyberLÄND plus Max Schmierer from b.ReX present how AI supported figures connect immersive experiences, community interaction, and digital business models.
At 9:50, REVERSE TURING TEST sets five ticket holders in a train compartment, billed as a group ticket for artificial intelligences, with one human hidden among them. The twist is that AI systems identify the human.
At 10:10, Kameraarbeit für Virtual Production frames virtual production as a broadened form of cinematic thinking, where composition, lighting design, scenography, performance, and real time visualization merge. Matthias Bolliger is the speaker.
At 10:30, Breakfall focuses on capturing spontaneous moments. Frederik Stapf and Raphael Tonn explain how improvised movement becomes an animated dance film.
At 11:00, EGON SCHIELE. Eine persönliche Begegnung is a realistic VR experience by Gerda Leopold, framed as a journey through Vienna around 1900. The artist looks back on life, speaks with participants, and asks questions.
At 11:20, TREMENS combines live performance and virtual reality, inspired by Timon von Athen by William Shakespeare. The XR experience was developed at Residenztheater München. An excerpt is presented by the Belgian media art collective CREW. The piece places the audience in flowing architectures and interactive avatars, with the boundary between stage presence and virtual experience described as blurring.
At 11:40, AniTrailer and AniPlay cover student team production over four months, resulting in either an animated trailer or an interactive experience. The speakers listed are Diana Arellano, Clara Deitmar, Sam Matsa, and Lennart Haak, with insight into collaborative workflows, XR technologies, and virtual production approaches.
At 12:00, XR in Baden-Württemberg introduces the Carl Laemmle Institut and with two funded research projects named VISTA and IMRL, both focused on extended reality at the interface between the creative industries and other industrial sectors.
Hands on experiences
From 14:00 onward, the program switches to XR experiences on site.
TREMENS appears as a live performance and VR hybrid with continuously transforming spaces, interactive avatars, and architecture.
FATE OF THE MINOTAUR is a location based VR experience developed at Animationsinstitut. Players take the role of human sacrifices from Athens sent into the labyrinth by Minos, King of Crete, and face a choice: kill the Minotaur or spare the tormented creature. The story supports different immersive levels depending on technical and spatial conditions on site.
LICHTUNG invites visitors into a sleeping world that wakes up gradually through interaction.
LIMBO is an interactive installation where visitors explore their most beautiful memories through a conversation with an artificial intelligence, while reflecting on how memories shape personal convictions and influence society.
The takeaway for post, VFX, and realtime folks
This program stitches viewpoint experiments, realtime visualization language, stage driven XR, and interactive installations into one schedule, and it keeps practical constraints visible, like immersion levels adapting to venue and gear for FATE OF THE MINOTAUR.
https://www.filmakademie.de/de/news-aktuelles/article/xr-day-2026-immersion-kunst-performance
