ENPT XR - 2023

Workshop on Emerging Novel Prototyping Techniques for XR (ENPT XR)

Workshop hosted by IEEE VR 2023, March 25, 2023, Shanghai, China, (Online)

Mission of the Workshop

Bring together researchers and industry practitioners from different backgrounds to discuss the future of prototyping for VR, AR, and 3D User Interfaces, and help chart a course for the future of XR prototyping techniques.

Introduction

Extended reality has finally become a mainstream technology. Recent advances in commercial VR and the calls by big tech companies to build the “Metaverse,” have increased interest in the medium. This interest forced designers from different backgrounds to look for effective ways to communicate their ideas to technical developers and rapidly prototype effectively for XR.

This full-day workshop will bring together researchers and industry practitioners from different backgrounds to discuss the future of prototyping for VR, AR, and 3D User Interfaces, and help chart a course for the future of XR prototyping techniques. We invite authors to submit 4-6 page papers on any of the following topics:

Rapid prototyping for XR experiences (AR, VR, MR)
Rapid prototyping by novice and non-tech-savvy designers
Prototyping for immersive storytelling
Prototyping for Haptic/tactile feedback in XR applications
XR hardware design and prototyping
Repurposing of existing prototyping techniques for immersive contexts
Novel prototyping techniques supported by custom devices/tools
Prototyping techniques or technologies/plugins/frameworks designed specifically to support novice (non-technical) users in designing/prototyping XR
User/case studies evaluating the above topics
Speculative design evaluating the future of the above topics

Related but unlisted topics are also welcome. In addition to a presentation at the workshop, authors of all accepted submissions will be strongly encouraged to demonstrate their novel prototyping techniques in a video which will be shared with the workshop participants.

We seek to tie these contributions together intellectually with unifying ideas, frameworks, and theories that provide common ground for discussing, analyzing, connecting, inventing, comparing, and making predictions about emerging new prototyping techniques as well as to identify gaps or opportunities for a future research agenda from gaps in a new taxonomy. To start the discussion concretely, we will use the notion of prototyping for XR experiences by novice/non-tech-savvy designers.

Workshop Questions for Discussion

Do these prototyping techniques differ among VR, AR, MR, etc.? How? Why?
What is common about these new prototyping techniques, and what things or ideas connect them? What differs?
Do they vary in importance based on the application, e.g., storytelling vs healthcare app?
Is there a next generation of prototyping techniques or just a set of disparate developments? Are they unique to XR or inspired primarily by other arts like film or fields like engineering?
Taking prototyping for XR experiences by novice/non-tech-savvy designers as a provisional starting point, is it possible to extend, expand, support, disagree with, or modify the initial XR prototyping techniques for novice designers' framework? or introduce alternative approaches?
How can we predict, understand, and identify gaps in prototyping for XR experiences by novice/non-tech-savvy designers?
Are there opportunities for new methods or tools inspired by gaps uncovered by this?

Provisional Schedule

Saturday, March 25th, 2023 (Shanghai Time, GMT+8)

Keynote Speakers

Keynote 1: The (State of the) Art in Rapid Prototyping for XR

Michael Nebeling, PhD

Associate Professor & Director of the Information Interaction Lab, University of Michigan

Bio:

Dr. Michael Nebeling is currently on sabbatical at Meta Reality Labs Research in Redmond. He is also an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Information Interaction Lab. He is interested in designing and studying novel methods and tools to create virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (XR) experiences that are easy and safe to use. His current focus is on creating new toolkits, authoring tools, and interaction techniques that improve XR interactions both from a usability and security/privacy perspective.

In terms of application domains, he is particularly interested in the role XR technologies can play to improve education and accessibility. He wants AR/VR to become useful and effective interaction modes that bring real benefits to users taking into account their context, task, and preference. His earlier research established principles, methods, and tools for the design, development, and evaluation of multi-device and cross-device user interfaces. In a second thread of research, he demonstrated how to use crowdsourcing to create responsive web designs, to write a paper from a smartwatch, or to design gesture recognizers. He regularly serves on the program committees of the ACM CHI and UIST conferences. Recently, he was UIST 2021 Papers co-chair. He received a Disney Research Faculty Award, a Mozilla Research Award, and an Epic MegaGrant. Working with U-M's Center for Academic Innovation, he started his role as XR Faculty Innovator-in-Residence with the U-M wide XR Initiative in 2019. He created the XR MOOC series, a three-course AR/VR specialization on Coursera. He joined U-M in 2016 after completing a postdoc in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich.

Keynote 2: Research Directions in XR Prototyping

Mark Billinghurst, PhD

Director of the Empathic Computing Laboratory & Professor, University of South Australia & University of Auckland

Bio:

Mark Billinghurst is Director of the Empathic Computing Laboratory, and Professor at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia, and also at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. He earned a PhD in 2002 from the University of Washington and conducts research on how virtual and real worlds can be merged, publishing over 700 papers on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, remote collaboration, Empathic Computing, and related topics. In 2019 was given the IEEE VGTC Virtual/Augmented Reality Career Award for lifetime contributions to Human-Computer Interaction for AR and VR and in 2023 elected as a Fellow of the IEEE.

Selected Demo of Presented Work

Designing Prototype XRI Workspaces with Mixed Reality and IoT Devices for Immersive Adaptive Environments

Jigyasa Agarwal and Alexis Morris

OCAD University, Canada

Important Dates

IEEE VR Conference Papers Author Notification December 15, 2022, 23:59 GMT/UTC time
Submission Deadline January 15, 2023, 23:59 GMT/UTC time (Extended) January 25, 2023, 23:59 GMT/UTC time
Notification Deadline January 20, 2023, 23:59 GMT/UTC time (Extended) January 28, 2023, 23:59 GMT/UTC time
Camera-Ready February 3, 2023, 23:59 GMT/UTC time

Submission Information

Papers should be submitted via PCS: https://new.precisionconference.com

Submissions must be anonymized and in PDF format, in the VGTC format: http://junctionpublishing.org/vgtc/Tasks/camera.html

All submissions will be reviewed by experts in the areas listed above. At least one author of each accepted submission must register for the workshop and IEEE VR 2023 conference. Authors of accepted papers will be expected to give a short presentation at the workshop, and encouraged to give a demonstration of their research as a video. Proceedings will be submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore Library. We will also host the papers on this site.

Potentially, these papers will be seeds of journal article contributions under a special issue through an arrangement with a Journal or a magazine. This is to be confirmed soon.