X-Visual was also present this year from November 10 to 11, 2025 at the Annual Meeting of Process Engineering and Materials Technology (#PEMT2025) organized by DECHEMA in Frankfurt, bringing concentrated mixed reality power to the conference. We were supported by our partners Technical University of Berlin (Department dIbItIa) and the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) from the WIR! alliance MR4B, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space. The annual conference provided an excellent platform to present the latest developments in digital and virtual plant design and industrial mixed reality applications.

Insightful panels and excellent posters

The highlights of the program included several insightful panels, presentations, and posters. On the first day, Hernán Darío Muñoz Gil (TU Berlin) presented his lecture “Mixed Reality for Safe Operations: Connecting MR Devices to Process Automation and Documentation”, which showed how mixed reality technologies can be securely linked to process automation and documentation. The focus was on MR-supported checklists for complex maintenance and operational tasks that provide “hands-free” support in hazardous environments.

On the second day, Sarah Karioui (TU Berlin) showed how LLM and RAG systems extract information from industrial manuals and make it usable for mixed reality applications. Also on the second day, Shady Khella (TU Berlin) presented the possibilities of the MR Datahub in his lecture “Generating Design Options in Basic Engineering Using the Semantic Web,” which links process information, maps it in a Neo4j database, and enriches it with reference data—a key contribution to the digital engineering of chemical plants.

In addition to the presentations, the partners of the MR4B alliance presented their research results in the form of a poster: “Simplifying the Development of Industrial Mixed Reality Applications Using the MR DataHub,” which was jointly created by Shady Khella (TU Berlin), Erik Esche (BAM), Rico Schady (FoP Consult), Philip Parker (Rösberg Engineering), Hernán Muñoz (TU Berlin), Markus Schröder (Serrala), Jens-Uwe Repke (TU Berlin, Department of Dynamics and Operation of Technical Plants), Frauke Weichhardt, and Markus Schichtel (Semtation). The poster illustrated how a flexible API platform accelerates the development of industrial MR applications and won the PEMT 2025 Best Poster Award!

Live demonstrations and practical insights

At the X-Visual booth, visitors were able to try out the first mixed reality applications as prototypes live, including the MR4SOdemonstrator with AR-supported work instructions and the virtual plant tour from the MR4B project KEPLER. X-Visual also presented the latest version of the P&ID software PlantEngineer and the latest developments in digital and virtual plant design. The presentations met with great interest and led to numerous exciting technical discussions.

We were also particularly pleased to welcome the MR4B advisory board, including Norbert Kockmann and Simone and Leon Urbas, who gained insights into the projects on site.

Overall, PEMT2025 clearly demonstrated how diverse and forward-looking the current topics in process engineering are. X-Visual and the MR4B alliance demonstrated that mixed reality and digital engineering solutions are already practical, safe, and efficient tools for industry today. The live demonstrations, presentations, and posters made it clear that the future of plant design is digital—and that mixed reality plays a central role in this.