The program included 11 lectures and 3 workshops, by 12 instructors. This year, the Spring School was selected as an ACM Europe School, recognizing its quality and impact as a training event for the European research community. The event was organized by Silvia Rossi, Irene Viola, Thomas Röggla, and Pablo Cesar from CWI, and Omar Niamut from TNO.
"The future of immersive communication is not only technical but it is deeply human. Understanding how people trust, feel, move, and interact in virtual environments is as critical as the systems that make those environments possible." With this vision in mind, the organisers created for a fourth edition a multidisciplinary program around the research topic of Social XR. Through lectures and hands-on workshops, leading researchers in the field introduced participants to the state of the art while opening space for critical discussion on the open challenges facing the field.
Topics
The program covered a broad range of topics at the intersection of immersive technology, human behavior, and system design: trust and safety in social virtual environments, ethical and human-centered approaches to XR design, affective computing and mental health applications, socially intelligent and AI-driven virtual humans, haptics and tactile interaction, volumetric video technologies, mobility research in XR, and the future of communications in education and research. Together, they provided a multidisciplinary perspective that went beyond knowledge transfer: bringing together early-career researchers from diverse backgrounds to create the groundwork for new collaborations and a growing community around Social XR.
List of talks and workshops:
- "The Future of Communications and Interaction" by Gül Akcaova and Mark Cole— workshop
- "Towards Ethical, Human-Centered XR Experiences: From Theory to Practice" by Katrien de Moor — workshop
- "Volumetric Video Technologies for Real-Time Immersive Communication" by Guillaume Gautier and Alexandre Mercat — workshop
- "Studying Mobility in eXtended Reality" by Yan Feng
- "A Brief History of Virtual Humans" by Marco Gillies
- "Affective Social XR and Intercorporeal Regulation: A Multi-Method Approach to Supporting Mental Health and Well-being" by Alexandra Kitson
- "Designing Inclusive XR: Experience from Day-to-Day Industrial Research" by Marta Orduna
- "Socially Intelligent Digital Humans" by Chirag Raman
- "Tactile Extended Reality: The Role of Haptics in Immersive Interactive Applications" by Maria Torres Vega
- "Trust and Safety in Social XR" by D. Yvette Wohn
- "AI-driven Animation for Virtual Humans" by Zerrin Yumak
