Frank Steinicke is a professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Informatics at the Universität Hamburg. Before his current position, he was a professor of Computer Science in Media at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Würzburg and chair of the Immersive Media Group from 2011 to 2014. He studied Mathematics with a Minor in Computer Science at the University of Münster, from which he received his Ph.D. and Venia Legendi in Computer Science. His research interests are focused on understanding the human perceptual, cognitive, and motor abilities and limitations to improve interactions and experiences in computer-mediated realities. He received the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award in 2023 for his scientific contributions and was inducted into the prestigious IEEE VR Academy.

Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco is a Computer Scientist and Neuroscientist.  She is a Research Scientist Manager at Google where she leads input interactions and XRAI experience innovations for Android XR. She has envisioned Android XR multimodal and multidevice interactions to the OS and unified input vocabularies. Before working at Google, she was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research where she innovated for products such as Xbox, Hololens, Soundscape and Teams, adding features used on a daily basis by millions such as Avatars for MS Teams, available to over 260 million users, that won Times Invention of the year 2022. Her technical work has produced over 40 patents (some pending), and +10 open-source projects. Apart from her technological contributions, she is a prolific scientist with over 100 publications and does regular service as program committee, chair and reviewer in top venues (ACM, IEEE, Nature Publishing, Royal Society, AAAS Science). She was awarded the IEEE VGTC VR New researcher award in 2022, and the NAE early-career engineer.