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SurgAgentXR just won 2nd place in the AI × XR for Healthcare track at the XR Creator Con Hackathon 2026 finals in Berlin! Together with Ajay Alageshan from the Visualisation Group at the University of Magdeburg and Ana Sodia Santos (external), Katarzyna Olszyńska and Prakash Pandi took part in the XRCC Hackathon in Berlin. Everything … Read more
Katarzyna Olszyńska and Robin Urrutia Escobar have bin to the 6th Summer School on AI, Robotics and XR Medical Augmented Reality Summer School (MARSS) for Clinical Applications in Shenzhen & Hong Kong. This was a great opportunity to dive deeper into the topics they work on daily – robotics, AI, and XR in the medical … Read more
Wei Wei successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled “Towards a Liver Tumor Ablation Intervention System: Deep Learning-based Automatic Ultrasound-CT/MRI Registration” on June 5, 2026. The thesis committee included Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jana Dittmann (University of Magdeburg), Prof. Dr. Christian Hansen (University of Magdeburg), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sylvia Saalfeld (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel), Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Gerrit Zöllner (Universitätsmedizin … Read more
IEEE VR 2026 took place in Daegu, South Korea, from 21 to 25 March 2026. As the world’s leading research conference on virtual, augmented and mixed reality, it brought together top international researchers to present peer-reviewed scientific breakthroughs for the XR technologies of the coming decade. Danny Schott, Florian Heinrich and Fabian Joeres were involved … Read more
On Monday, 15 December, Tonia Mielke successfully defended her doctoral thesis entitled ‘From Registration to Evaluation: Towards Efficient Human–Robot Interaction’. The work was carried out at the Research Campus STIMULATE and examines intuitive methods for controlling robotic arms using hand gestures and the support of these interactions through mixed reality. The doctoral colloquium and dissertation … Read more
On 11 December 2025, Oleksii Bashkanov from the Human–Machine Interaction research group at the Research Campus STIMULATE at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg successfully completed his doctoral colloquium. In his dissertation entitled ‘Multimodal Deep Learning for Enhanced Prostate Cancer Diagnosis and Grading,’ he focused on the development of AI-supported methods for improved prostate cancer diagnostics. … Read more
VAR group members Robert Klank and Katarzyna Olszyńska, working with Daniel Oquelis and Maria Tam, won first prize in the Meta-sponsored category “AI & Passthrough Camera Access” at the international XR Creator Con Hackathon (30 October–26 November 2025). Organised by the XR Ecosystem, the competition is considered the largest independent hackathon for extended reality worldwide. … Read more
At the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) in Daejeon, South Korea, Tonia Mielke, in collaboration with Mareen Allgaier, Christian Hansen, and Florian Heinrich, received a Best Paper Honorable Mention award for their work “Extended Reality Check: Evaluating XR Prototyping for Human-Robot Interaction in Contact-Intensive Tasks.” ISMAR is one of the leading … Read more
Danny Schott successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled “Of Individual and Collaborative Experiences: Training and Learning in Immersive Environments for Medical Education,” with the distinction summa cum laude on April 3, 2025. The thesis committee included Prof. Dr. Dieter Schmalstieg (University of Stuttgart, Germany), Prof. Dr. Daniel Roth (Technical University of Munich, Germany), and Prof. … Read more
For the scientific contribution entitled “Exploring Interaction Concepts for the Manipulation of a Collaborative Robot: A Comparative Study“, Josefine Schreiter, in collaboration with Tonia Mielke, Marilena Georgiades, Maciej Pech, Christian Hansen and Florian Heinrich, was awarded an Honourable Mention at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in Melbourne, Australia. The video accompanying the paper can be found here. … Read more