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Call for Participation in MR/AR for Mental Health

Last updated: 2025-06-05 01:44PM GMT

Overview

Mental Health Overview

Mental health conditions pose a major challenge to healthcare providers and society at large. The World Health Organization predicts that by the year 2030, mental health conditions will be the leading disease burden globally. Mental health services are struggling to meet the needs of users and arguably fail to reach large proportions of those in need. Early intervention, support and education can have significant positive impact on a person’s prognosis.

Augmented, Virtual and/or Mixed Reality environments can create new effective models in the wider context of prevention and support for individuals affected by mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, mood disorders, psychotic disorders, addictive behaviours and substance abuse disorders.

Following our successful ISMAR 2019 (China), ISMAR 2021 (Italy), ISMAR 2022 (Singapore), ISMAR 2023 (Australia) and ISMAR 2024 (USA) workshops on the same topic as well as a special issues we recently organised at Virtual Reality journal, the goal of this workshop is to provide an opportunity for Extended Reality researchers and Health researchers and practitioners to submit their original ideas, work-in-progress contribution, and position papers on the design and/or evaluation of new mental health technologies. We are interested in theoretically, empirically, and/or methodologically oriented contributions focused on supporting mental health delivered through novel designs and evaluations of on AR/VR/MR systems. In addition to potential benefits, we would also like to receive contributions on potential dangers of using such technologies for addressing mental health issues.

Keywords: mental health, VR, AR, MR, XR, social media, serious games, mhealth, vhealth, sensors, internet of things

Important Dates

Submission Guidelines

  1. Publication
    • The accepted workshop papers will be published in ISMAR 2025 adjunct Proceedings and IEEE Xplore.
  2. Format of the workshop
    • paper presentations followed by Q&A, discussion at the end.
  3. Paper length
    • Papers should be between 3 and 7 pages in length (excluding references).
    • Please use the template used for the main conference.
  4. Presentation Mode
    • Hybrid (In person and online on Zoom)
  5. Submission


Organizers

The list of Mixed/Augmented Reality for Mental Health(MARMH’25) Organizers below, along with their profile images, can also be found in the Organizing Committee tab under the ‘Committee’ section.

Nilufar Baghaei (PhD University of Canterbury, New Zealand)

Dr. Baghaei is a Senior Lecturer and the Co-Director of Extended Reality Lab at The University of Queensland. Her team is working on designing engaging immersive technologies and games and studying their effectiveness in improving mental health, physical health and learning. She has an extensive list of publications in prestigious international journals and conferences and is an Associate Editor of ijHCS, VR (Springer) and Games for Health journals. She is also acting as a Demo Chair at ISMAR 2025.

Hai-Ning Liang (PhD Western University, Canada)

Prof Liang is an Associate Professor at HKUST. His team is researching new interaction techniques for virtual and augmented technologies and their applications in gaming, training, health, and learning. His work has been published in high-level journals and conferences.

Stephen Viller (PhD University of Lancaster, UK)

Dr Viller is a researcher and educator in human-centred design methods, particularly applied to designing social, domestic and mobile computing technologies, and understanding how people’s interactions in everyday settings inform the design of such technologies. He has over 30 years of experience in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Interaction Design, and Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) research, where he has focused on bridging disciplines and perspectives. He leads UQ’s Human-Centred Computing discipline within the School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science.

Richard Porter (MD Newcastle University, England)

Prof. Porter leads the Mental Health Clinical Research Unit at University of Otago. His main research interests are in the treatment of mood disorders. He has a particular interest in clinical trials in mood disorders, service delivery, psychological treatments and electroconvulsive therapy. He has conducted multiple studies into the neurobiology of mood disorders and particularly the neurobiology of cognitive impairment. He is a consultant psychiatrist specialising in psychiatric care of adults with intellectual disability.

Mark Billinghurst (PhD University of Washington, USA)

Mark Billinghurst is Professor of Human Computer Interaction at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia. He earned a PhD in 2002 from the University of Washington and researches innovative computer interfaces that explore how virtual and real worlds can be merged, publishing over 300 papers in topics such as wearable computing, Augmented Reality and mobile interfaces (hindex: 102). He received the 2013 IEEE VR Technical Achievement Award for contributions to research and commercialization in Augmented Reality. In 2013 he was selected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.