DIS organizes 3rd Edition of Spring School on Social XR

The program included 9 lectures, 4 of them open, and 3 workshops, by 14 instructors. The event was organized by Silvia Rossi, Irene Viola, Thomas Röggla, and Pablo Cesar from CWI, and Omar Niamut from TNO.

“The future of media communication is immersive, and will empower sectors such as cultural heritage, education, manufacturing, and provide a climate-neutral alternative to travelling in the European Green Deal”. With such a vision in mind, the organization committee continued for a third edition with a holistic program around the research topic of Social XR. During keynotes and workshops, prominent scientists in the field shared their knowledge with students and triggered meaningful conversations and exchanges.

Topics

The program included topics such as the ethics and public values for the design and development of responsible social XR experiences, volumetric content creation based on AI, evaluation of QoE and user experience, privacy and security challenges, and how immersive virtual environments can influence user attitudes and behaviors. Together, they provided a holistic perspective, helping participants to better understand the area and to initiate a network of collaboration to overcome current limitations of current real-time conferencing systems.

The spring school started as part of the semester program organized by the DIS group of CWI. It was initiated in May 2022 with the Symposium on human-centered multimedia systems: a workshop and seminar to celebrate the inaugural lecture, “Human-Centered Multimedia: Making Remote Togetherness Possible” of Prof. Pablo Cesar. Then, it was continued in 2023 with the 1st Spring School on Social XR an in 2024 with the 2nd Spring School on Social XR.

List of talks and workshops:

• “Novel Opportunities and Emerging Risks of Social Virtual Reality Spaces for Online Interactions” by Guo Freeman
• “Privacy, Security and UX Challenges in (Social) XR: an Overview” by Katrien de Moor
• “Cooperative Development of Social XR Evaluation Methods” by Pablo Pérez and Jesús Gutiérrez
• “Changing Habits, One Experience at a Time” by Funda Yildirim
• “The Multiple Dimensions of Social in Social XR” by Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn
• “AI-based Volumetric Content Creation for Immersive XR Experiences and Production Workflows” by Aljosa Smolic
• “From Principle to Practice: Public Values in Action” by Mariëtte van Huijstee, Paulien Dresscher
• “Challenge-Driven Quality Evaluation and Dataset Development for Immersive Visual Experiences” by Emin Zerman
• “Shaping VR Experiences: Designing Applications and Experiences for Quality of Experience Assessment” by Marco Carli
• “Making a Virtual Reality” by Elmar Eisemann
• “Interoperability: What is a Visual Positioning System and Why an Open Source One and Interoperability Between These Systems Need to be Established” by Alina Kadlubsky
• “Robotic Avatar Mediated Social Interaction” by Jan van Erp