{"id":19394,"date":"2026-06-10T14:46:50","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T12:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.laval-virtual.com\/?p=19394"},"modified":"2026-06-10T15:06:55","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T13:06:55","slug":"xr-in-industry-and-defence-when-constraints-become-a-strategic-advantage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.laval-virtual.com\/en\/xr-in-industry-and-defence-when-constraints-become-a-strategic-advantage\/","title":{"rendered":"XR in Industry and Defence: When Constraints Become a Strategic Advantage"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Summary of the “Industrie & Défense” conference cycle, Thursday 9 April 2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n

The essentials: XR is establishing itself as a strategic tool in both the industrial and military sectors. During the “Industrie & Défense” cycle at Laval Virtual, six speakers demonstrated how the sovereignty and security constraints specific to defence can be turned into competitive advantages for the entire immersive technology sector, and how concrete use cases are redrawing the boundary between civilian and military applications.<\/strong> The architecture decisions made under defence constraints (off-cloud deployment, data traceability, modular infrastructure) are proving directly transferable to the most demanding industrial environments.<\/strong> Europe’s XR sovereignty, speakers agreed, must be built on software and data rather than hardware: the realistic battleground lies in code, deployment architecture and data control.<\/strong><\/h2><\/h2>\n\n

Laval Virtual: 28 years of immersive innovation<\/h2><\/h2>\n\n

Laval Virtual is Europe’s leading reference event for immersive technologies, held annually in Laval, in the Mayenne department of France, since 1999. Its 28th edition took place from 8 to 10 April 2026 at the Espace Mayenne, bringing together researchers, industry players, institutions and startups around concrete applications of virtual, augmented and mixed reality<\/a>. The “Industrie & Défense” cycle on 9 April 2026 offered an alternating programme of panels and use cases, enabling direct dialogue between experts from both worlds.<\/p>\n\n

Working for the defence industry begins with a culture shift<\/h2><\/h2>\n\n

Maria Madarieta, CSM and R&D Manager at Virtualware, a Spanish company specialising in XR solutions for industry and defence, opened the panel with a question many hesitate to ask: is it actually possible for a small or medium-sized enterprise to enter the defence market?<\/p>\n\n

The answer is a nuanced one. She described a viable access route through innovation programmes that allow startups and SMEs to co-develop solutions with defence ministries, on the condition that outcomes are shared. This model opens doors, but requires a deep transformation of cost structures.<\/p>\n\n

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“Prepare your product from the beginning thinking you are going to be in a very demanding infrastructure. That is the key. It works in nuclear, in defence, and in civilian industries.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

She then shared an empirical rule of thumb: the cost of an industrial MVP must be multiplied by five to ten to reach industrialised product standards, then again by two to three to meet defence-sector requirements. It is not simply a matter of money, she noted, but of effort and organisational maturity. Virtualware has lived this journey with its Viroo platform, designed from the outset for constrained environments: the same codebase can now be deployed in a Spanish health school, a railway infrastructure, or a military setting, with differentiated access rights.<\/p>\n\n

The Virtualware representative also highlighted a prerequisite that is rarely documented: military culture. Long, highly hierarchical decision cycles, specific communication codes and registers: all of these must be mastered before making first contact. Fabien Dumon extended this point without hesitation: “There is a culture, a specific language to talk with them, and you need to learn that before talking with them.” Patience and time, she concluded.<\/p>\n\n

XR sovereignty: choosing your battles wisely<\/h2><\/h2>\n\n

Fabien Dumon, Immersive Technologies Leader at Airbus Defence and Space and head of the immersive technology innovation cluster, broadened the discussion to the scale of a major industrial group. On the question of hardware sovereignty, the executive was direct: in the XR field, it is an illusion. The only truly mature headset manufacturers are Meta, Microsoft (now absent from the market) and Apple. No European company has the investment capacity to compete, Airbus included. For the sector, sovereignty must focus where it remains achievable: data, software and deployment architectures.<\/p>\n\n

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“You cannot ask military people to start their device by entering their Facebook account or their Apple ID. That is the main problem.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

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On the technical architecture front, the specialist argued for a modular approach designed from the outset to run on Google Cloud, Azure, or on a local infrastructure without any cloud dependency: the sine qua non for working with defence. The AirCube platform, developed internally at Airbus, embodies this logic: first deployed on military programmes, it now covers the full lifecycle of both civil and military aircraft, from engineering to maintenance.<\/p>

He also pointed to a structural European gap that is rarely acknowledged: the absence of a sovereign 3D rendering engine. Dassault Systèmes is working on the subject, but the complete XR technology chain remains heavily dependent on American players.<\/p>\n\n

Dual use: the discreet catalyst of the XR sector<\/h2><\/h2>\n\n
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Jérémy Lacoche, researcher at Orange Innovation specialising in digital twins and XR for augmented technicians, brought the perspective of a telecom operator engaged in use cases at the intersection of civilian and military applications.<\/p>

He illustrated the concept of dual use with a concrete example: Orange now uses its telecom towers to monitor potentially malicious drones near nuclear power plants. A civilian infrastructure repurposed for national security missions.<\/p>

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He also noted a background trend visible across several editions of Laval Virtual: solutions originally designed for entertainment or industry are progressively migrating towards defence, sometimes within just a few years. The case of Varjo is a recent illustration: long positioned as an industrial reference, the Finnish manufacturer now explicitly targets military simulation sectors in its communications. On software sovereignty, the Orange researcher mentioned the work of the CNXR in France, which is mapping the full XR value chain to identify precisely where Europe is present or absent. He considers this work indispensable for guiding industrial decisions.<\/p>\n\n

The crime scene made navigable<\/h2><\/h2>\n\n

Captain François Poucin, officer at the Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale (IRCGN), presented project JANUS: a system for digitising, reconstructing and immersively visualising crime scenes, developed entirely in-house by a small team of developers. It was the Gendarmerie Nationale’s first intervention in 28 editions of Laval Virtual. Its presence was welcomed as a symbol of the sector’s maturity.<\/p>\n\n

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2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

JANUS rests on four stages: laser or drone acquisition (Faro scanners, DJI drones, photogrammetry covering up to 50 km²), creation of a metrically certified digital twin (COFRAC-level quality assurance), implementation of forensic elements, and visualisation across all platforms (smartphone, tablet, Windows, Linux, Pico headset). The officer was firm on one imperative:<\/p>\n\n

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“Il ne sert strictement à rien de faire des choses magnifiques si on ne peut pas les utiliser ou les partager. Si on doit envoyer un jumeau numérique en Nouvelle-Calédonie, le réseau n’est pas forcément adéquat.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

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The modules developed go well beyond simple visualisation. Digital judicial reconstruction allows a defendant to be placed inside the 3D environment of a crime without any physical transfer. Camera matching, applied notably to cases of failure to stop for police, makes it possible to reposition all available cameras within the 3D environment, animate the scene over time, and have jurors adopt the exact viewpoint of the driver at the moment of the facts. The objective is pure observation, free from interpretation.<\/p>\n\n

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Project Voyager, currently under development within the IRCGN, extends this logic further: a “virtual reality<\/a> truck”, to be produced by a French company, will enable judicial reconstructions to be conducted directly inside remand prisons, without the defendant needing to be transferred. The IRCGN retains full ownership of the software solution and relies on French partners for hardware, Varonia in particular.<\/p>\n\n

The digital twin within everyone’s reach<\/h2><\/h2>\n\n

Emmanuel Mouren, CEO of WeMap, a French company specialising in spatial mapping, opened his presentation by pushing back against the prevailing narrative around digital twins. His starting point: digital twins are expensive to build, become obsolete the moment they are published, and never sufficiently justify the cost of updating. A vicious circle well known to operators of complex sites. WeMap’s answer rests on a 360-degree camera, an AI-powered image-processing pipeline, and a capture process conducted at a normal walking pace with no technical expertise required. The CEO summed up this shift in paradigm:\r\n<\/p>\n\n

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“Our retail customers manage their own updates four times a year, without any intervention from WeMap. That is the real paradigm shift.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

The figures presented are striking. The capture of the Louvre (70,000 m²) was carried out by a single person in one day, with one day of post-processing. Seventeen stores of a national retail brand, each exceeding 5,000 m², were covered by one person in one month. Across the SNCF network, detection of tactile paving strips on platforms was rolled out to more than 50 stations in under 15 minutes per station, after two hours of training on a reference station.<\/p>\n\n