AXIOM @ Maker Faire Berlin 2016

We've recently returned from an exciting trip to the Maker Faire Berlin 2016 where we exhibited three AXIOM Beta development kits, an AXIOM Gamma prototype and also showed our recent developments and production progress. But let's start at the beginning; the logistics involved were quite a challenge as we wanted to fill an entire booth with interesting things to play with and look at, so we ended up stuffing our car to the roof with cameras and other material at our offices in Vienna and then set off for Germany - travelling north across Europe.

The Maker Spirit

From our experiences at the Maker Faire Vienna back in April, we were anticipating quite a large crowd. We brought thousands of AXIOM stickers and around 800 flyers; we felt well prepared. But after the doors opened to the public, we were hit by a tsunami wave of people that only grew as time went on - not something we ever experienced at other expos. We ran out of flyers by 3pm on the first day and had to print new ones overnight. Throughout the whole day we were rarely able to leave our booth to explore or visit other booths and chat with the other teams. At our booth we presented Chroma Pong, a game where the AXIOM Beta tracks the position of two color gloves allowing players to control pong paddle positions by waving their hands.

There was a very positive vibe at the faire - with makers and other interested folks exploring and admiring what others have created. After the doors closed to the public, makers stayed overtime and experimented with combining devices or projects to try new things. For example, a team building drones collaborated with a team creating haptic gloves to control the drones with their gloves.

Maker of Merit

At the end of the last day at the faire, somebody from the organizational team walked past our booth, attached a blue ribbon on one of the exhibited AXIOMs without a word and was gone again before we noticed. Apparently that's their standard practice for honoring projects - we are now officially "Makers of Merit" :)

Impressions from the Faire