I am pleased to announce the sixth workshop on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, Transparency, and Ethics in XR (IDEATExR) has been accepted and will be held in conjunction with the 2025 International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality from October 8 to 12 in Daejeon, South Korea.
The potential benefits of XR should be for all, regardless of their cultural background, gender identity, race, neurodiversity, ethnicity, economic status, age, etc. However, our community is still facing challenges preventing equal involvement.
Most research within this space relies on the M-WEIRD user populations and is done by M-WEIRD researchers (Male, White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), effectively missing most of the world’s population [1], thus hindering the generalizability of findings and diversity of ideas. Approximately 95% of the global population is excluded from VR research [1] and only 15% of first-paper authors at IEEEVR are women [2]. Moreover, the ethics informing XR research have been identified as one of the grand challenges facing human-computer interaction research today, with the replication crisis featuring transparency as a critical step for remediation. More recently, global political forces have placed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) research in the crosshairs, leading to reduced funding opportunities and a chilling effect in these research areas. It is more critical than ever for our research community to reaffirm our commitment to safeguarding research in these fields. Proactive support is essential not only to protect vulnerable lines of inquiry but also to ensure that evidence-based solutions continue to inform equitable research practice and applications in XR. These factors make formal discussions surrounding inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, transparency, and ethics in XR not only timely but also necessary. And we want you to be part of this. It’s important to note that these concerns are also relevant to technical work not involving human participants as they also play a role in research teams, ideas, proposed solutions, conduct, etc.
Due to the important, evolving, and shifting nature of inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, transparency, and ethics in XR, this workshop has six main goals:
- To provide a vehicle through which to understand better the pulse of the community surrounding issues of inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, transparency, and ethics in XR,
- To shine a spotlight on these issues for community members who perhaps haven’t seen or given them much consideration,
- To celebrate those that are engaging in research either true to the spirit of inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, transparency, and ethics in XR, or those engaging in research about these topics specifically,
- To help researchers better understand how to ensure their work are more inclusive, diverse, equitable, accessible, transparent, and ethical, particularly in their software and study design,
- To spotlight how people are represented in XR technologies (or not) as researchers, designers, participants, and users,
- And to bring together disparate perspectives and research foci together under a shared goal to be inclusive, diverse, equitable, accessible, transparent, and ethical in XR. This goal can be shared by software, hardware, and human-focused researchers.
Participants in this workshop will have the opportunity to provide their insights on what is working for our community, as well as what isn’t – effectively helping to shape the future of ISMAR and XR research.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
This workshop has six facets: inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, transparency, and ethics. We expect researchers to submit early work that has already shown a commitment to one or more of these aforementioned facets. These could include work with diverse participants, work examining skin-tone rendering in AR, computer vision algorithms for differently-abled hands, testing of accessibility and usability of a VR app for those with different sensory abilities, etc. Further, while we anticipate this next type of paper to be rarer, we anticipate papers that feature research explicitly regarding the realm of diversity in XR. Finally, position papers informed by either survey of the literature or profound experience in the facets of this workshop are also well within our scope.
IMPORTANT DATES
- Paper Submission Deadline: Friday July 25th, 2025 (23:59 AoE)
- Notification: Friday August 1st, 2025 (23:59 AoE)
- Camera-ready version: Friday August 15th, 2025 (23:59 AoE)
SUBMISSION
We welcome paper submissions from 2-5 pages, excluding references. Authors should also provide a brief explanation (At least one paragraph; no more than 1 page attached in supplementary materials) of how they feel their paper fits into this workshop or achieves the workshop’s facets. Paper quality versus length will be assessed according to a contribution-per-page judgment. Papers will be considered in relation to their intended scientific merit AND their contribution or adherence to inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, transparency, and ethics in XR.
Submissions must be written in English and follow the IEEE Computer Society VGTC format described at: https://tc.computer.org/vgtc/publications/conference/
To submit to the workshop, authors must use the form here. Submissions will be reviewed by at least 2 program committee members following a single-blind review process. Accepted papers will be given guidelines for preparing and submitting the final manuscript(s) together with the notification of acceptance.
Past submissions and examples can be found here, or here, or here
ORGANIZERS
Lee Lisle, Ph.D., University of Central Florida, llisle@ucf.edu
Cassidy Nelson, Ohio University, cassidynelson@ohio.edu
Matt Gottsacker, University of Central Florida, mattg@ucf.edu
G. Nikki Ramirez, Virginia Tech
Zubin Datta Choudhary, University of Central Florida
CITATIONS
[1] T. C. Peck, K. A. McMullen, J. Quarles, K. Johnsen, C. Sandor, and M. Billinghurst, “DiVRsify: Break the Cycle and Develop VR for Everyone,” IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl., vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 133–142, 2021, doi: http://www.doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2021.3113455.
[2] T. C. Peck, L. E. Sockol, and S. M. Hancock, “Mind the Gap: The Underrepresentation of Female Participants and Authors in Virtual Reality Research,” IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 1945–1954, 2020, doi: http://www.doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2020.2973498