DIS Group at IEEE VR 2025

The DIS team was pleased to contribute to IEEE VR 2025, held this year in Saint-Malo, France. The conference provided a community and platform to present recent research, demonstrate interactive systems, and engage in interdisciplinary dialogue on emerging trends in virtual and extended reality. The DIS group participated across multiple areas of the program, including a full paper, a demo, a workshop paper and poster, as well as the organization of two thematic workshops.

• Full paper: “Comparison of Visual Saliency for Dynamic Point Cloud: Task-free vs. Task-dependent” by Xuemei Zhou, Irene Viola, Silvia Rossi, Pablo Cesar
• Demonstration: “Fashion Beneath the Skin – A Fashion Exhibition Experience in Social Virtual Reality” by Karolina Wylężek, Jack Jansen et al.
• VR-HSA Workshop paper with an Honorable mention: “User-centric requirements for enhancing XR use cases with machine learning capabilities” by Sueyoon Lee, Moonisa Ahsan, Irene Viola, and Pablo Cesar
• Workshop: “Multi-modal Affective and Social Behavior Analysis and Synthesis in Extended Reality”
• Workshop: “Social Interaction and Collaboration in eXtended Reality”

The paper “Comparison of Visual Saliency for Dynamic Point Cloud: Task-free vs. Task-dependent” was accepted for presentation at IEEE VR 2025 and for publication in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. It presents a comparative study of visual saliency for dynamic 3D point clouds in 6 degree of freedoms VR environments, analyzing differences between task-free and task-dependent viewing conditions. Our experimental results provide both qualitative and quantitative insights, revealing significant differences in visual attention due to task influence. The proposed Task-Free eye-tracking dataset for Dynamic Point Clouds is shared with the community. This work was partially funded by the TRANSMIXR EU project.

The group welcomed many fellow researchers interested in Extended Reality in our digital exhibition “Fashion Beneath the Skin – A Fashion Exhibition Experience in Social Virtual Reality”, connecting the world of new technologies with old beauty of historical fashion. The immersive virtual reality installation explores digital fashion, embodiment, and social interaction in shared virtual spaces. This demo presents a social VR fashion museum (part of the 5Dculture EU project), where visitors engage with fashion artefacts. The experience spans across three different spaces designed for various goals. This application, created following a human-centred approach, explores how the visitors interact with each other and the exhibits, considering their 3D volumetric representation and changing environmental context throughout the experience.

They presented, as well, the paper “User-Centric Requirements for Enhancing XR Use Cases with Machine Learning Capabilities” at the International Workshop on Virtual Reality for Human and Spatial Augmentation (VR-HSA). The paper reports the user-centric approached followed by the group to gather user requirements for the integration of of Machine Learning (ML) and eXtended Reality (XR) technologies in the VOXReality EU project. In particular, it shows the results from two focus groups around the use cases of (a) Virtual Conference, which mimics a real-life like conference in a VR environment (VRDays Foundation) and (b) Augmented Theatre, which showcases a Greek play in AR environment (Athens Festival).

The group organized two workshops in the conference as well: SIC-XR and MASSXR. The first one, Social Interaction and Collaboration in eXtended Reality, lead by the PhD student Andrea Antonio Cantone (University of Salerno), who is doing an internship at CWI. The other organizers are Pablo Cesar, Giuliana Vitiello (University of Salerno), and Tanja Kojić (TU Berlin). The workshop was an opportunity to explore the dynamics of social interaction and collaboration in immersive technologies, with a specific focus on XR applications. Fourteen papers (11 regular papers and 3 position papers) were presented and a keynote on “Human Augmentation – Understanding, Playing, Learning” was given by Stephan Lukosch, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. The second one, Multi-modal Affective and Social Behavior Analysis and Synthesis in Extended Reality, was organized by Pablo Cesar, and explored interdisciplinary approaches to modeling, analyzing, and synthesizing affective and social behaviors in XR contexts.

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