From the short anime for Ray-Ban to the mixed reality fire simulator: in Milan the Next Alliance award chose the best Italian projects in generative AI and immersive technologies.
A fire that does not exist, but which must be tackled with the right gestures, in the right order. It’s the heart of Fire Xperience, the mixed reality simulator that won one of three categories in the 2026 Next Alliance Awards.
The award, promoted by Next Alliance, a consortium that brings together digital agencies, technology producers, venture capital funds and startups, selects every year Italian projects that apply generative artificial intelligence, Web3 and immersive technologies to products, services and communication. Evidence Network is among the media partners of the initiative.
The 2026 edition featured projects created between January 2025 and September 2026 divided into three categories. The first, Gen AI, concerns the use of generative artificial intelligence to create content, data or services, for example with autonomous agents.
The second, AI Creative introduced this year, rewards communication campaigns and content in which AI is a creative and narrative tool. Finally, Web3 & Immersive is the category dedicated to blockchain, augmented and virtual reality and virtual worlds.
A jury of 16 experts evaluated the applications (increased by 20%) based on six criteria: innovation, impact and usefulness, technical quality, user experience and design, market potential, strategy.
Virtual flames, real hands
Fire It works with a Meta Quest 3 headset. Unlike virtual reality, which replaces what we see, mixed reality overlays digital elements on the real environment, which remains visible. According to the developers, this reduces the nausea typical of headsets and allows you to interact with your hands, without a controller. The participant faces a fire start and must put into practice the five key actions foreseen in firefighting training.
Second place, and Web3 Visionary award, for Heritage – Generative Family Wealth by Ottomega. It is a platform for the generational transfer of family assets that combines generative AI, blockchain and decision psychology.
Third DANSITE by Impersive for the Aterballetto National Dance Foundation: choreographies created for historical places, such as Palazzo Milzetti in Faenza, which the public can see again in virtual reality in the same space in which they were filmed.
Virtual shop assistants and simulated brains
In Gen AI, LuxAvatar by BitForFun Italia for EssilorLuxottica won: a vending machine for glasses with a virtual sales assistant inside. It is a talking avatar, guided by artificial intelligence, which communicates with the customer, analyzes their face, recommends models, lets them try them on and manages the purchase
According to 8 Wave’s 8 Wave Agent Studio, a platform for creating enterprise AI agents, that is, programs that perform tasks such as customer support by asking for confirmation from a person before each action.
Third Neurocast by Yakkyo, a company that works mainly in online commerce. It is software designed for those who advertise: it analyzes a video scene by scene and predicts how the audience’s attention, emotional response and memory will vary, so as to correct the content before investing in its diffusion. The same goes for billboards and musical pieces. No spectators are examined: the system is an artificial intelligence model trained on functional magnetic resonance imaging data, the technique that indirectly measures the activity of different areas of the brain. According to Yakkyo’s CEO, Giovanni Conforti, the data comes from a study on 700 people exposed to images and sounds; However, the company has not published measures of forecast accuracy.
Entertainment, space and seats
In AI Creative, the winner was Ray-Ban.EXE by FM for EssilorLuxottica, an animated short film inspired by webtoons, the Korean digital comics. It tells of a world governed by machines, where individuality and memories are erased: a curious theme for a work awarded as an example of artificial creativity. It was presented in Seoul, in the brand’s first pop-up store in Korea.
According to FIAT PANDINA. The most loved Italian in the universe by Triplesense Reply, the first Fiat commercial made with AI, which takes Italy’s best-selling car on an interplanetary adventure by mixing generated images, 3D graphics and visual effects.
Third, and AI for Impact award, The Empty Place by Akita Film and RebelOTT, for the campaign of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport and Assogiocattoli on car seats. The commercial, created entirely with artificial intelligence according to the association, revolves around a simple image: an empty seat.
Beyond the window
Marketing weighs heavily in the palmarès: two of the nine projects on the podium were created for EssilorLuxottica and several winners are advertising campaigns or sales tools. However, alongside these, applications appear for safety training and cultural heritage. According to the president of Next Alliance, Andrea De Micheli, generative AI and immersive technologies “have passed the experimental phase”. The complete list is on nextalliance.it.
