Last updated: 2026-06-19 08:00AM CET
AI-Driven Virtual Humans
Main Contact Person: Marco Gillies
> Tutorial Website
This tutorial will explore how we can populate MR and VR environments with believable, interactive virtual humans. Encountering a virtual human in XR is a powerful experience, because, unlike an on-screen character, the virtual human can be life-sized and share a space with the participants, making body language cues like eye contact and body posture work as they do in the real world. The rise of LLMs has revolutionised the ability of technology to handle realistic dialogues with people. However, there is a lot missing before we are able to create realistic virtual characters that are able to interact with a real person in a face-to-face conversation. A large proportion of our human-to-human communication is non-verbal including gestures, facial expressions, gaze and posture. This tutorial will introduce virtual humans and their application, including training, mental healthcare, psychology experments and entertainment. It will then go into depth on how we perceive virtual humans and the implications for how we will design them. The second half explain how Deep Neural Networks and LLMs can be integrated with a VR system, followed by an extensive discussion of non-verbal communication. The tutorial will end with suggestions of how to evaluate virtual humans, and suggestions of future research.
Building Interoperable Location-based Augmented Reality with the Open AR Cloud
Main Contact Person: Gábor Sörös
> Tutorial Website
This tutorial provides an overview of location-based augmented reality and the spatial web, the related ecosystem, use cases, and challenges related to the lack of interoperability between proprietary solutions. The Open AR Cloud Association promotes an open spatial web and develops open-source components towards this goal. Participants will learn about these components, sample use cases, and gain access to a toolset to build their own location-based AR testbeds with digital experiences anchored to the real world.
Emerging Reviewing and Publication Models to Promote Trustworthy Research and Support Scientific Career Advancement
Main Contact Person: Ed Swan
> Download CfP
Is anyone actually happy with the way that peer review is currently implemented? When I have asked this question during the previous times that this tutorial has been offered, at VR 2025 and VR 2026, nobody was. For reviewers, requests to perform ever-increasing numbers of reviews are unceasing. For editors, recruiting reviewers is ever more difficult. For authors whose work is accepted, the review process might be okay (for now), but about 75% of all submissions to the VR and ISMAR conferences receive the wrong answer (from the authors’ point of view). Of course, authors of rejected papers often resubmit, leading to yet more review requests. Generally, everyone is burned out and unhappy. And on top of all of this is the specter of AI cranking out endless fraudulent papers. Does anyone think that human reviewing can keep up with AI?
This situation leads to many problems. Authors are rewarded for novel results that are positive and tidy, and (especially) experiments that report statistically significant results. Also rewarded are minimal results, leading to more papers. There is little motivation to share data, materials, and code. All of this has a negative impact on the overall research enterprise. It has led to low research credibility, including the replication crisis, where many results cannot be replicated by others. When mistakes in published research are discovered, there is little motivation to correct them, and no way to correct what archived in our standard digital libraries. Together with the fact that paper and citation counts are important for career advancement, the author reward system creates incentives for predatory journals, paper mills, and research fraud.
However, there are reasons for optimism. Many research communities, including our own, are experimenting with new reviewing and publication ideas and models. This tutorial discusses the social context that mediates scientific communication, including reviewing practices for scientific papers and proposals, and how these practices motivate researchers as they seek career success. The tutorial surveys current and emerging thinking on how this context might be optimally tuned to produce scientific results that are trustworthy and lead to scientific career advancement.
Interaction Design for Extended Reality
Main Contact Person: Joaquim Jorge
> Tutorial Website
Extended Reality (XR) is transforming how we engage with digital content, yet designing compelling XR experiences remains challenging. This tutorial presents foundational and advanced concepts in Interaction Design tailored for XR environments, focusing on methods for ideation, design, and prototyping, and evaluation. We will explore user-centered design approaches and walk participants through a selection of design patterns, prototyping tools, and real-world case studies. The session emphasizes practical takeaways for building natural, inclusive, and engaging XR applications for both research and deployment contexts.