The second International Workshop on Interactive Extended Reality (IXR) will be held in conjunction with the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2023 (ACM MM 2023) in Ottawa, Canada, on October 29, in the morning.
Over the years the development and optimization of multimedia systems from traditional media (static 2D imagery and 2D video) to immersive media (manipulable 3D and XR) have been tailored towards delivering better experiences in remote communication. This has been essential for enhancing the sensation of presence and interactivity provided by immersive media, where users are no longer passive consumers but assume active engagement and decision-making. The topic has attracted a lot of attention from academia as well as industry players, with several publications and patents published every year on the topic, in addition to relevant standardization effort from organizations such as ITU, JPEG and MPEG.
Despite remarkable advances, current Extended Reality (XR) applications are in their majority local and individual experiences. A plethora of interactive applications, such as teleconferencing, tele-surgery, interconnection in new buildings project chain, Cultural Heritage and Museum contents communication, are well on their way to integrate immersive technologies. However, interconnected, and interactive XR, where participants can virtually interact across vast distances, remains a distant dream. In fact, three great barriers stand between current technology and remote immersive interactive life-like experiences, namely the (i) content realism, (ii) motion-to-photon latency, and accurate (iii) human centric quality assessment and control.
Overcoming these barriers will require novel solutions at all elements of the end-to-end transmission chain. This workshop focuses on the challenges, applications, and major advancements in multimedia, networks and end-user infrastructures to enable the next generation of interactive XR applications and services. We hence encourage original paper submissions, which have not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere, from both academia and industry presenting novel research addressing the aforementioned challenges.