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DIS Organises Sping School on Social XR

Publication date: 2023-05-25

As part of the research semester program of CWI, the Distributed and Interactive Systems group (DIS) organized the Spring School on Social XR. The event took place on March 13th – 17th 2023, and attracted 33 students from different disciplines (technology, social sciences and humanities). The program included 18 lectures, 4 of them open, by 20 instructors. The event was organized by Irene Viola, Silvia Rossi, and Pablo Cesar from CWI; and Omar Niamut from TNO. It was co-sponsored by ACM SIGMM, the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia, and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

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

The program included topics such as the capturing and modelling of realistic avatars and their behavior, coding and transmission techniques of volumetric video content, ethics for the design and development of responsible social XR experiences, novel rending and interaction paradigms, and human factors and evaluation of experiences. 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.

Apart from science, there is always time for fun, so a number of social events took place, including a visit to the recently renovated museum of Sound and Vision!

The spring school is part of the semester program organized by the DIS group of CWI, which 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.

The list of talks were:

  • “Discovering Horizon Europe Projects: TRANSMIXR - Ignite the Immersive Media Sector by Enabling New Narrative Visions” by Niall Murray
  • “Understanding Social Touch in XR” by Gijs Huisman
  • “Designing ‘Weird’ Social Experiences for XR” by Katherine Isbister
  • “Virtual Social Interaction and its Applications in Health and Healthcare” by Sylvia Xueni Pan
  • “How to Create Virtual Humans and Avatars for Social XR?” by Zerrin Yumak
  • “Navigation and View Management for Interactive 360 Streaming Systems” by Klara Nahrstedt
  • “Immersive Video Delivery: From Omnidirectional Video to Holography” by Christian Timmerer
  • “Movement Remapping as a Solution to Interaction” by Mar Gonzalez Franco
  • “Perceptual Quality Assessment of Point Clouds” by Evangelos Alexiou
  • “Design, Develop and Evaluate Social XR Experiences” by Jie Li
  • “The Psychology of Social Presence” by Tilo Hartmann
  • “Towards a Responsible Metaverse” by Mariëtte van Huijstee and, Stefan Roolvink
  • “Using Empathic Computing to Create Social XR Experiences” by Mark Billinghurst
  • “Pre & Post for Volumetric Video” by Natasja Paulssen
  • “A Journey to Volumetric Video - the Past, the Present and the Future” by Oliver Schreer
  • “eXtended Reality and Passengers of the Future” by Stephen Brewster
  • “Enabling Interactive Networked Virtual Reality Experiences” by Maria Torres Vega
  • An Overview on Standardization for Social XR” by Pablo Perez, Jesús Gutiérrez

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