IDEATExR Workshop

IEEEVR is hosting their second rendition of the Workshop on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, Transparency, and Ethics in XR (IDEATExR) at IEEEVR ’25 in Saint-Malo, France! To be held on Saturday, 8 March 2025.

The schedule is below, with background on what IDEATExR’s goals and why the workshop is timely following. You can download a pdf version of the schedule here.

Due to the important, evolving, and shifting nature of inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, transparency, and ethics in XR, this workshop has five main goals:

The potential benefits of XR should be for all, regardless of their cultural background, gender identity, race, neurodiversity, ethnicity, economical status, age, etc. However, our community is still facing challenges preventing everyone from being involved in xR.

Most research within this space relies on the M-WEIRD population and researchers (Male, White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), effectively missing 95% of the world’s population [1], thus hindering generalizability of findings and diversity of ideas. In fact, approximately 95% of the global population is excluded from VR research and only 15% of first-paper authors at ISMAR and 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. These factors make formal discussions surrounding inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, transparency, and ethics in XR not only timely – but necessary. And we want you to be a part of them.

Premier venues for AR/VR (or XR) research do not have a clear code of ethics including issues surrounding diversity that could help provide greater DEI initiative consistency between conferences and guidance to researchers. 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.

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 IEEEVR and ISMAR.

Keynote Speaker – Dr. Marc Latoschik
From A(vatars) to Z(ero) Latency: Determinants of a Metaverse

This talk will provide an overview of the current research conducted by the HCI group at the University of Würzburg, Germany. We will highlight advances in virtual embodiment research, with a particular focus on the implications of photorealistic avatars reconstructed from real users in 3D. The talk presents a number of interesting use cases of the combination of XR and AI, including social VR for learning purposes, VR therapy for various types of injuries and disorders, from knee surgery to obesity, as well as VR systems for training public speaking and classroom management. During the talk, we will also present a range of recent work on theories of XR and noteworthy findings on the risks and downsides of VR, from the effects of latency fluctuations to the impairment of decision-making in VR gambling and novel approaches to protecting privacy in social XR environments through biometric user identification using deep learning.