Bringing public administration together with innovative founders and companies—this was precisely the intention behind the City of Munich's Innovation Award. Following an application and selection phase, the three winners have now been honored.
Mayor Josef Schmid, Head of the Department of Labor and Economic Development, together with IT Officer Thomas Bönig and Claudius Blank, Head of Digitalization and Telematics at Munich's municipal utility company (SWM), presented the City of Munich's Innovation Award at the Vorhoelzer Forum in Munich. The winners were Holo Light in the category "Augmented Reality - Display of Digital Information," and Teratrace and LXElectronics in the category "Crowd Awareness - Recording Munich Subway Capacity."
The goal of this first-ever competition is to open up public administration to innovation and offer innovative companies and startups an opportunity to implement and test new approaches. To find suitable matches, the competition participants submitted their solutions to predefined municipal challenges in advance. The winning teams will now have the opportunity to further develop their ideas and test them in practice. They will be supported by the incubation program. EXPRENEURS the UnternehmerTUM.
Category “Augmented Reality” goes to Holo Light
The task in the "Augmented Reality - Display of Digital Information" category was to visualize and virtually model the future development in the new Freiham district based on the digital 3D city model. The company "Holo Light" was awarded the Innovation Prize in the Augmented Reality category. The solution approach that impressed the jury offers, on the one hand, the representation of the city model in room scale, for example, as a projection onto a table for discussion in committees or at public events. It is also conceivable to display the new district in real size (world scale) from a platform in an undeveloped area such as Freiham.
Teratrace and LXElectronics impress in the “Crowd Awareness” category
The "Crowd Awareness – Recording Capacity on the Munich Subway" category called for ideas on how to measure, display, and evaluate visitor flows and their distribution at subway stations. The jury decided to award two prizes in this category because two completely different approaches were ultimately discussed. SWM will therefore test the solutions together with the applicants at two separate subway stations.
The Innovation Award goes to the company "Teratrace," a spin-off from the Technical University of Munich. Sensors use Bluetooth to record the IP addresses of mobile devices. Data protection regulations are adhered to by immediately anonymizing the data. This makes it possible to track the individual movements of a device without identifying the user and without creating a movement profile. For Teratrace, receiving the Innovation Award represents the opportunity to test its data model in public spaces for the first time. The jury was impressed by the solution's scalability and the medium-term potential to transfer this system to other modes of transport, thus learning more about traffic flows.
The second innovation award goes to "LXElectronics," a startup founded in 2017 that takes a completely different approach. Microphones record and analyze footfall noise from pedestrians. The resulting footfall counts are used to record and forecast passenger movements. For LXElectronics, winning the innovation competition means testing the microphones they developed themselves as prototypes and developing them to market readiness. The jury was impressed by the approach, which achieves solid and reliable measurement results with comparatively minimal installation effort, allowing for forecasts. Furthermore, footfall noise is a measurement parameter that is evaluated without the need for subsequent anonymization of personal data.
