SAXR 2026 Proceedings 🎉

Human social interactions are evolving rapidly due to societal change and advances in communication technologies, creating both opportunities and challenges for mediated communication. Social augmentation, defined as the enhancement or transformation of social and emotional cues through virtual elements, is emerging as an important strategy for improving understanding, collaboration, and empathy.

XR technologies, including VR, AR, and MR, offer unique capabilities to replicate and extend social cues, forming the foundation of Social XR. These technologies enable features such as adaptive gaze, enhanced facial expressions, multimodal feedback, and group emotion visualization, which support richer social presence and more inclusive communication.

This workshop invites submissions on the design, implementation, and evaluation of Social XR systems. Relevant topics include the integration of social augmentation with artificial intelligence for adaptive interactions, the ethical and privacy implications of affective data, scalable deployment strategies, and rigorous methods for assessing the effectiveness and accessibility of augmented social cues.

Applications in education, healthcare, collaboration, therapy, and creative practice are particularly welcome. By uniting insights from HCI, XR, CSCW, psychology, and AI, the workshop aims to establish shared research agendas and best practices for socially intelligent XR technologies that enhance communication, engagement, and empathy across diverse contexts.

Topics of Interest

This workshop invites contributions on Social XR, Extended Reality (XR) systems enhanced with social and emotional augmentations. We welcome research, design, and practical applications across domains such as education, healthcare, professional collaboration, creative performance, and entertainment. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Social augmentation techniques for VR, AR, and MR environments.

• Adaptive and context-sensitive social XR systems integrating AI.

• Methods for enhancing communication through expressive avatars, gaze cues, and augmented facial expressions.

• Multimodal approaches for interpreting and responding to social and affective signals.

• Evaluation protocols and metrics for assessing social engagement, trust, empathy, and user experience in Social XR.

• Ethical, privacy, and inclusivity considerations in socially augmented systems.

• Integrating social cues seamlessly into physical and virtual environments.

• Tools and frameworks for designing, testing, and deploying Social XR applications

• Domain-specific applications: collaborative learning, therapy, remote teamwork, creative and performative experiences.

• Innovative solutions for scalable, adaptive, and context-aware social augmentation.

Reviewing process

All papers will be reviewed by a minimum of two domain experts. Submissions may present empirical studies, case analyses, theoretical perspectives, or speculative design proposals. The review process will be single-blind: reviewers will know the authors’ identities, so authors must be listed on the paper, and no anonymization is required. All contributions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on relevance and quality.

Submission types

We invite submissions for extended abstracts (5 to 9 pages, excluding references, in single-column CEUR-WS format) via EasyChair. Submissions may present empirical studies, case analyses, theoretical perspectives, or speculative design proposals. Accepted papers will be published as open-access proceedings in CEUR-WS, and at least one author of each must register for and attend the workshop in person. 

Shorter contributions under 4 pages will also be considered; however, if accepted, they will be included in arXiv rather than CEUR-WS. Additionally, authors of CEUR-WS–accepted papers may optionally upload a revised version of their work to arXiv, provided that it differs from the CEUR-WS camera-ready version. 

Accepted papers may also be considered for a possible Special Issue in a journal, such as the Empathic Computing Journal.

Workshop Participation Requirements

Participation in this workshop will take place in person during ACM CHI 2026, held in Barcelona from 13–17 April 2026. All participants must be formally registered through the official CHI 2026 registration system.

There is no additional fee to attend the workshop beyond the standard CHI conference registration. However, at least one author of each accepted contribution must register for, attend, and participate in the workshop in person.

Important Dates 

Workshop Date: April 13–17, 2026 – TBD

Participant abstract submissions due: (on or before) February 18, 2026 (EXTENDED)

Participants notified of acceptance: (on or before) Febbrary 25, 2026

Program committee

• Alessandro Visconti

• Fabrizio Lamberti

• Theophilus Teo

• Gun A. Lee

• Allison K. Jing

• Kiyoshi Kiyokawa

• Adalberto L. Simeone

• Davide Calandra

• Alberto Cannavò

• Tamil Selvan Gunasekaran

• Bowen Yuan

• Hyunwoo Cho

• Eunchae Lim

• Roberta Macaluso

• Zhidian Lin

• Hexu Chen