Taking a Stylus to Stellenbosch

Back from ACM MMSys 2025 in Stellenbosch, where I ran the industry demonstration for No Code XR-CAx Experience Creation Workflows. Live demos are a different discipline to talks, and this one had a packing list.

The demo takes a CAD assembly, puts it in the room with you through colour passthrough, and lets you draw on it in three dimensions with a stylus. It sounds simple. The reason it is worth demonstrating is that everything between the SolidWorks file and the annotation is meant to be done by a mechanical engineer with no programming background, following a document.

What a travelling XR demo actually needs

• An XR laptop, a headset, a stylus, and a spare set of AA batteries with a charger, because the stylus will die mid-session.
• A television and a long HDMI cable, so the people not wearing the headset can see what the wearer sees. This matters more than anything else.
• Three metres by two metres of taped-off floor, because people walk into you.
• A reboot plan. If the link drops, reboot everything in order rather than debugging in front of a queue.

The most useful conversations were with people who build production tooling rather than research prototypes. Two of them asked the same question within an hour: what happens when the SDK updates? That is the honest weak point of this whole approach, and it became a section of the thesis rather than something I talked my way around.

The same build went on to the TUS Engineering Expo the week after I got back, which is the cheapest possible way to test a demo on an audience that owes you nothing.