A landslide can seriously injure or even kill people. Now, a new early warning system will be the fi rst to employ geological data in tandem with the latest weather forecasts to provide a concrete warning in emergency situations.

Energy is getting more and more expensive, and experts are predicting record electricity and heating prices. A software platform promises to lighten the load for households and businesses by making it easier for consumers to put renewables to good effect.

If the glare from photovoltaic installations blind airline pilots at take-off or landing, this could be extremely hazardous. In the future, though a new software program will calculate when and where white-outs could occur – and how to prevent them.

e-Learning has become a fixture in continuing education courses. However, students not only prefer to learn at home, but also to have access to course materials while on the go. The Fraunhofer Academy exhibits how this is already conveniently possible today, using an easy-to-operate iPad app. With the new version, lecturers in particular will find it even easier to upload digital content.

Ever want to leaf through The Book of Hours that belonged to Charles the Bold? If that piques your interest, now you can: With just a point of the finger, you can turn the pages, enlarge them and upload more detailed information. A new software program from the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut (HHI) in Berlin, will allow you to completely rediscover 1,000 year-old books.

For production operations, quality assurance over the process chain is indispensible: it is the only way to detect problems at an early stage and lower additional costs. Fraunhofer researchers developed an efficient type of quality control: With a pointing gesture, employees can input any detected defects to car body parts into the inspection system, and document them there.

Process plants have useful lives of thirty to fifty years, during which time they are routinely retrofitted. Virtual reality software simplifies and helps keep track of retrofit planning and testing. Fraunhofer researchers and BASF SE are jointly developing VR solutions for the plant life cycle.

Artists are often colorful personalities. This one, though, comes across as cool, precise and metallic – and is anything but extravagant. No wonder – after all, it’s an industrial robot, one that will convert the Fraunhofer stand at CeBIT into an art studio. Its artistic genius only emerges if someone takes a seat on the model’s stool positioned in front of the robot: first, its camera records an image of its model

Games, e-mails and around-the-clock Internet access – smartphones are making the information culture an even more prominent part of everyday life. Businesses and employers are also increasingly relying on mobile companions with apps developed expressly for the task at hand. In the future, for instance, apps will help farmers in organizing harvest their crops or provide support for business travelers.

Spacecraft must operate with utmost precision when conducting landing maneuvers on other planets, or docking to a space station. To ensure they do not drift off course, imaging sensors collect a fl ood of data that are analyzed in real time. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Architecture and Software Technology FIRST have engineered a system based on multicore technologies that allow spacecraft to be piloted and positioned with pinpoint accuracy.

With the aim of better protecting endangered species, game wardens are studying the behavior of surviving great apes in the wild. This is often painstaking work because it is difficult to distinguish between different individuals. A new software system will make things easier by analyzing the animals’ faces for individual identification.

When electronic devices refuse to work, you rarely find the solution in the manual. Technicians often face similar problems with industrial machines, and companies end up flying in experts from the manufacturer to get things running again. A new system aims to help manufacturers lend a hand regardless of how far away they are located.

If people had access to a fully-fledged system to help them navigate public transport, it could persuade many drivers to switch to their local trains, buses and trams. Researchers are busy developing an application that will enable passengers to use a cell phone to navigate their way through the public transport network.