Social VR Workshop 2024

Under Construction...

Social VR Workshop at IEEE VR 2024

Increasingly we are spending time interacting with each other digitally, be it business meetings or catching up with friends and families. Social VR provides the opportunity of making these virtual social engagements more intuitive. Platforms such as Gorilla Tag, VRChat, and Horizon Worlds have provided an alternative reality (or, the “metaverse”) for us to meet for work or play games remotely, with our colleagues, or strangers we never met in real life.  Given the range of commercial systems available to the public, there is relatively little academic research that reflects and builds upon this commercial work. 

In this workshop, we invite researchers in this area to come together to discuss how to build, use and evaluate these tools. We encourage papers reporting novel research and systems, as well as position papers on the following topics:

• Platforms and tools to build social VR systems

• Access to social scenes from various devices and the impact of asymmetry

• Avatar representation and its impact on users’ social behaviour 

• Tools to represent users, objects and places inside the social space

• Evaluation methods for social VR, from lab-based experiments through to longitudinal social evaluation.

• Critiques of social VR from different standpoints from media theory through to ethics

• Reports on extended usage of social VR from a self-reflection point of view, or through analysis of a user group.

• Proposals or reflections on how to manage and govern online spaces

• Rights, permissions and ownership of virtual assets

• Prospects or proposals for interoperability of systems towards metaverse-like systems

Organisers

Deadlines and format:

We will plan a ½ day workshop, with two sessions, each session having a longer keynote, a set of short papers presentations (5-8 minutes with demos strongly encouraged within this time limit). Each session will have 5-8 talks, with a total of 10-15 talks in total.

We encourage two types of submission:

• Research paper: 4-6 pages + references

• Work-in-progress or position paper: 2-3 pages + references

All paper submissions must be formatted using the IEEE Computer Society VGTC conference format. Accepted papers and posters will have to be formatted by the authors according to the relevant camera-ready guidelines. (https://tc.computer.org/vgtc/publications/conference/). 

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: 10th January, 2024

• Notification deadline: 19th January, 2024

• Camera-ready deadline: 24th January, 2024