Open Lectures Spring School on Social XR 2026

*09:30-10:30
D. Yvette Wohn - New Jersey Institute of Technology, United States
Talk: Trust and Safety in Social XR
Personal webpage

Dr. Wohn (she/her) is an associate professor at NJIT and director of the Social Interaction Lab. She studies the characteristics and consequences of social interactions in online environments such as virtual worlds/metaverse and social media.

*11:00-12:00
Marco Gillies - Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom
Talk: A Brief History of Virtual Humans
Personal webpage

Marco is a professor of Computing and co-director of both the Masters in Virtual and Augmented Reality and the Social, Empathic and Embodied Virtual Reality Lab. He has been researching Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence since the late 1990s and has particularly worked on virtual humans and movement-based interaction with VR. He was one of the first people to apply machine learning to virtual humans in the early 2000s. Since then he has applied virtual reality to a wide range of areas including healthcare, dance, social interaction, psychology, education and fine arts. He is also the developer of the first MOOC on virtual reality, the Coursera VR specialisation, which has had over 100 000 learners.

*09:30-10:30
Alexandra Kitson - University of Victoria, Canada
Talk: Affective Social XR and Intercorporeal Regulation: A Multi-Method Approach to Supporting Mental Health and Well-being
Personal webpage

Dr. Alexandra Kitson (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher in the VIXI Lab at the University of Victoria. Her work focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating emerging technologies—including XR, AI, and wearable systems—to promote health and well-being. Her award-winning research has been showcased internationally and published in top venues such as ACM CHI, IEEE VR, and NeurIPS. Driven by a passion for social impact, Dr. Kitson applies her expertise to real-world applications through community-engaged research.

*11:00-12:00
Maria Torres Vega - KU Leuven, Belgium
Talk: Tactile Extended Reality: The Role of Haptics in Immersive Interactive Applications
Personal webpage

Prof. Maria Torres Vega is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at KU Leuven (Belgium), where her research focuses on devising human-driven control and management mechanisms for enhancing the perception of immersive multi-modal systems. She received her M.Sc. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, in 2009 and her PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), in 2017. In her years in academia, she has authored more than 80 publications, including four best paper awards. She has been awarded the 2022 CNOM Young Professional Award granted by the IEEE Communication Society Technical Committee on Network Operation and Management and 2023 the 2023 Rising Star Networking and Communications granted by the IEEE Communication Society N2Women section. Furthermore, she serves as reviewer of a plethora of journals and conferences and has served in the organizing committee of many conferences (e.g., NetSoft, QoMEX, MMSys) including the general chairing of the 2023 Quality of Multimedia Experience conference (QoMEX 2023). Finally, she is the general chair of the 2026 edition of ACM Multimedia Systems.