[IMMER-SENSE] The 1st Interational Workshop on Immersion and Sensing for XR Experiences

Date: March 21, 2026

Location: Daegu, Korea (IEEE VR 2026)

Overview

The growing adoption of Extended Reality (XR) across domains such as education, healthcare, training, and accessibility has created a demand for more immersive, adaptive, and human-aware experiences.

Recent advances in sensing technologies—including physiological, behavioral, and environmental sensing—offer powerful means to achieve this. These technologies enable XR systems to perceive and respond to users and their contexts in real time. By tracking gaze, motion, biosignals, and contextual cues , sensing data has the potential to enable more adaptive, embodied, and inclusive immersive experiences that can respond to users' bodies, contexts, and emotions.

Despite this potential, the integration of sensing into XR remains fragmented and in its initial stages. Technical challenges in interoperability, sensor fusion, data latency, and calibration coexist with human-centered concerns, including privacy, accessibility, and ethical data use.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from XR, sensing, and HCI to explore this convergence. We will explore both the opportunities and the challenges of using sensing for building more intelligent, embodied, and context-aware XR systems. The workshop seeks to identify key opportunities, challenges, and design frameworks for sensing-driven XR and aims to establish a recurring community forum that advances the creation of intelligent, embodied, and ethically responsible immersive systems.

Workshop Goals

To take the pulse of the community—understanding current practices, challenges, and aspirations around sensing-driven immersion in XR.
To spotlight the transformative potential of adaptive and affective XR experiences powered by biosignals and contextual awareness.
To celebrate ongoing innovation in sensing, embodiment, and presence while encouraging critical reflection on ethics, privacy, and accessibility.
To equip researchers and practitioners with methods, frameworks, and collaborations that foster responsible and human-centered XR design.
To unite diverse perspectives from engineering, psychology, design, and HCI toward a shared vision of immersive, adaptive, and inclusive XR futures.

When : 21 March, 2026 (14:00-18:00)

Where: Conference Room 322A

The workshop invites contributions and discussions on (but not limited to) the following themes:

Adaptive and Affective XR: Leveraging biosignals (EEG, GSR, heart rate, gaze) to personalize learning, training, and entertainment applications.
Sensing for Embodiment and Presence: Physiological and behavioral sensing for enhancing immersion, empathy, and co-presence.
Context and Environment Awareness: Integration of spatial and environmental sensors for intelligent, context-sensitive XR systems.
Data Fusion and Interoperability: Challenges in synchronizing, standardizing, and interpreting multimodal sensor data.
Ethics, Privacy, and Accessibility: Ensuring transparent, responsible, and inclusive use of sensing data in XR.
Future Directions: Open research questions, benchmarking efforts, and opportunities for collaboration between academia and industry.

Keynote Speakers

Keynote Title: From Immersive Sensing to Meaningful Experience: Designing Embodied, Multimodal, and Adaptive XR Systems

Abstract:

Immersive sensing technologies have rapidly advanced our ability to capture rich streams of spatial, behavioral, and physiological data, yet sensing alone does not guarantee meaningful immersive experience. In this keynote, I argue that the true challenge lies in transforming sensed data into perceptually coherent, socially interpretable, and cognitively supportive experiences. Drawing on over a decade of research across augmented and virtual reality, embodied virtual agents, and multimodal interaction, I will illustrate how subtle physical–virtual cues, agent embodiment, and modality coordination fundamentally shape user perception, social presence, and decision making. Through examples spanning environmental interactions, empathic and adaptive virtual agents, and real-world deployments in healthcare, rehabilitation, and industrial contexts, I will show how immersive sensing becomes impactful only when it is embedded within human-centered interaction loops. The talk concludes by outlining design principles for next-generation immersive systems that move beyond raw sensing toward adaptive, embodied, and experience-driven XR, potentially offering a roadmap for the Immer-Sense community to design technologies that sense not just the world, but the human within it.

Bio:

Kangsoo Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering at the University of Calgary, where he directs the Human-X Interaction (HXI) Lab. His research focuses on designing human-centered extended reality systems that transform immersive sensing into meaningful perceptual, social, and cognitive experiences. Over the past decade, his work has explored embodied virtual agents, multimodal interaction, and adaptive XR systems, with applications spanning healthcare, rehabilitation, industrial training, and remote collaboration. He has published extensively in leading venues including IEEE TVCG, ISMAR, IEEE VR, and ACM VRST, and his research has received multiple best paper and honorable mention awards. He is actively involved in the XR research community as an organizer of international conferences and workshops, and as an editorial board member for major journals.
(https://www.hxi-lab.ca/)