EXCALIBUR was presented at Immersive Tech Week 2026, Europe’s leading festival for immersive innovation, as part of the EU Pitch Lounge: Culture, Creativity & Human Impact session held on Thursday, 25 June. The session brought together three EU-funded projects: STRATEGIES, EXCALIBUR, and HumAIne, to show how immersive technologies are reaching far beyond entertainment, into the operating room, the archaeological site, the game studio, and the policy room.
In a five-minute pitch, Ms. Erilda Goga, EXCALIBUR’s Dissemination and Communication Manager from VILABS BG, introduced the project to an audience of XR/AR professionals, researchers, and industry innovators from across Europe. The pitch focused on how EXCALIBUR brings cutting-edge immersive technologies to the protection of some of humanity’s oldest heritage.
How EXCALIBUR Uses XR and Digital Twins for Burial Cultural Heritage
The pitch highlighted how EXCALIBUR’s toolkits put extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence, and digital twin technologies directly to work on burial cultural heritage — from the moment a site is first captured in 3D, to the moment a museum visitor steps inside a reconstructed burial rite. Three toolkits were presented as concrete examples of this pipeline:
- TK12 — Advanced Digitisation and Interpretation XR Toolkit. Led by PIX4D, this toolkit uses photogrammetry to digitise burial sites, human remains, and artefacts specifically for use within immersive environments — the foundational step that makes every other toolkit possible.
- TK3 — Immersive Visualisation for XR Content Curation. This toolkit fuses 3D surface scans with CT-scan data into a single volumetric model, allowing researchers to examine what lies inside a sealed artefact without ever opening it.
- TK11 — Ethnographic Storyliving Experiences for Virtual Worlds. This toolkit blends archaeological material with its social and cultural context to build immersive XR narratives, transforming a static museum display into a lived experience of the past.
About Immersive Tech Week 2026
Immersive Tech Week welcomed over 2,500 professionals, 200+ speakers, and 100+ companies from more than 90 countries, making it one of the largest gatherings in Europe dedicated to XR, AR, and spatial computing. EXCALIBUR’s participation in the EU Pitch Lounge offered a valuable opportunity to connect with the immersive technology community and explore future collaborations beyond the project’s core cultural heritage network.
Why Immersive Technology Matters for Cultural Heritage
EXCALIBUR’s participation in Immersive Tech Week underlined a simple message: immersive technology is not only about entertainment. It can become a tool for research, preservation, interpretation, and care.
With EXCALIBUR, digital twins help experts visualise what is fragile, connect what is fragmented, and make better-informed decisions before acting in the physical world.