From June 16 to 19, 2026, the international conference on Extended Reality (XR) , “XR Salento 2026, International Conference on eXtended Reality,” took place in Otranto, Apulia. The conference focused on current developments in virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and artificial intelligence. It was aimed at researchers, students, faculty, developers, and industry representatives.
As part of the conference, Julian Stockemer, Emma Kunoth, and Klaus Böhm presented the short paper “Interactive Crime Scene Analysis in Virtual Reality: A Prototype for Spatially Linked Information and Contextualized Navigation,” which they co-authored with Fabian Püschel from the Hessian State Criminal Police Office (HLKA).
The research paper was developed as part of the TOPML project —Trading off Non-Functional Properties of Machine Learning (AI Lab). At its core is a VR prototype for crime scene analysis developed using the Unreal Engine. The application enables information to be linked spatially and navigation within a virtual crime scene to be context-aware. A police training crime scene, provided and measured by the HLKA, served as the data basis. The paper will be published in the “Lecture Notes in Computer Science” (LNCS) series by Springer.
The conference program included keynotes, panels, research presentations, posters, and demos. Thematically, the conference covered a broad spectrum: from applications in industry, medicine, and education to cultural heritage, serious games, and digital twins.
