MIXR - 1st International Workshop on Multi-party Interaction in eXtended Reality

MIXR will be held online in conjunction with CHItaly 2021

MIXR is an International Workshop, so all the submissions, proceedings, presentations will be in English.

Proceedings

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2934/

Workshop description

XR, or eXtended Reality, is an umbrella term that encompasses the areas of AR, VR, and MR, with strong emphasis on immersiveness, multimodality and presence. XR is a multidisciplinary field incorporating subjects such as computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and digital humanities. Within XR, collaborative environments is one of the fastest growing areas, as can be seen by the number of social VR worlds available today. Most of these environments focus on the graphical aspects of the environment, not fully taking advantage of multimodal and multi-party design. Interaction in these environments is largely limited to text chats and, in the case of a few systems, voice interaction. Deeper and more meaningful engagement and interaction in XR can be achieved by leveraging the principles of Social Signal Processing (SSP) and Affective Computing (AC). Due to the simultaneous one-to-one and one-to-many interactions that establish and evolve over time, Multi-party (group) Interaction in XR is a complex process, whose analysis is still an open challenge in SSP/AC.

Nowadays, the need for exploring Multi-party Interaction in XR settings is expanding, as people are increasingly meeting remotely through teleconferencing tools for practical reasons (e.g., working and living abroad) or, for example, as a result of the social restrictions related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. MIXR seeks to progress research on Multi-party Interaction in XR by pursuing the following objectives:

• to investigate how social science theories and models of Multi-party Interaction can be applied in or possibly adapted to XR scenarios
• to develop techniques for collecting multimodal data of Multi-party Interaction
• to promote interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration between scholars in Computer Science and Social Sciences on XR, Social Signal Processing, Affective Computing, Multi-party Interaction

Topics of interest

We invite participants to submit short (6 pages) papers that focus on Multi-party Interaction in XR. Topics of interest include Multi-Party (team/group) Interaction in XR, covering the following research areas:

• Emotion recognition and expression
• Movement expressivity
• Team emergent states and dynamics
• Joint activity/collaboration
• Immersive CSCW
• Education and creativity
• Serious games
• Multimodality
• Interaction fidelity
• Theoretical models
• System/interface ergonomics
• Novel technologies

Organisers

• Maurizio Mancini, University of Rome “Sapienza”, Italy
• Giovanna Varni, LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut polytechnique de Paris, France
• David Murphy, University College Cork (UCC), Ireland
• Fabio Pellacini, University of Rome “Sapienza”, Italy
• Laura Maye, University College Cork, Ireland
• Patrick O’Toole, University College Cork, Ireland

Supporters

This workshop has been partially supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) in the framework of its JCJC program (GRACE, project ANR-18-CE33-0003-01, funded under the Artificial Intelligence Plan) and by the SceneHash (A Content-Indexable Data Structure for Collaborative 3D Environments) Project.