HANSCOM AIR FORCE BASE, Mass. – The Hanscom Collaboration and Innovation Center, now called the Lantern, will host Spring Demo Days May 5-7 to give Hanscom personnel an opportunity to engage with new technology and products.
The in-person, trade show-style event is designed to connect industry and startup teams with Hanscom personnel and programs, said Heather Wormald, Lantern Spring Demo Days project manager.
“This event is really all about building relationships and providing a good opportunity for growth on both sides,” she said. “The Lantern wants to foster these relationships more than ever as we start to get out of the remote environment.”
Precautions are in place to ensure the event adheres to current installation COVID directives governing in-person gatherings.
“Under the current guidelines, we can accommodate about 40 people at a time in the demo room and we’ll have someone at the door keeping a headcount,” Wormald said. “If the weather is nice, we will also have tables set up outside under tents to reduce some of the traffic inside the facility and potentially allow more people to attend the event.”
The demo event is open to all Hanscom personnel. Participating companies will have tables set up in the Lantern’s demo room, located in Building 1607, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. May 5-6 and from 8:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. May 7.
“Everyone is free to stop by at any time during the day,” Wormald said. “All of the companies will be available to offer demos and provide more information on their products throughout the event.”
Some of the products and technology being shared include security-based applications and collaboration tools.
“One company is demoing a collaborative workspace designed to create immersive situational awareness and control over disparate information streams,” Wormald said. “It can include information feeds from robots, drones, cameras and enterprise software, among other sources.”
Organizers are still finalizing the list of participating companies, but confirmed currently are Dell, RavenTek, Tesseract, Illumio, Immersive Wisdom and Raft. These companies are ones that reached out to the Lantern’s executive director, Lt. Col. Darren Edmonds, seeking opportunities to connect with Hanscom.
“Lt Col. Edmonds created the Lantern Spring Demo Days event as a way to bring these companies onto the installation and give engineers, program managers and others a chance to see products and tech that could potentially support their mission needs,” Wormald said.
Edmonds hopes to make this a recurring event.
“We are hoping to set up demo days fairly regularly,” Wormald said. “As of right now, we’re planning to hold the next one the last week of May and then possibly a third event in July. We want to help attendees make those in-person connections that we haven’t been able to make in over a year.”
An agenda for the May 5-7 Lantern Spring Demo Days event can be viewed here. For more information, contact Wormald at heather.wormald@us.af.mil or Michelle Staskel at michelle.staskel.2.ctr@us.af.mil.