SAXR 2026
Social Augmentation through XR Technologies 2026

Table of Contents

• Preface
  Summary: There were 37 papers submitted for peer-review to this workshop. Out of these, 18 regular papers (10 or more pages) and 15 short papers (5–9 pages) were accepted for this volume.

Session 1: Sensing, Visualizing & Modulating Social Signals

• Exploring Spontaneous Emotion Recognition from Face Tracking in Head-Mounted Displays 1-10
  Julia Domingo Ajenjo, Almudena Palacios Ibañez, Alberto Altozano, Maria Eleonora Minissi, Manuel Contero, Mariano Alcañiz, Javier Marín Morales
• Making the Invisible Visible: Toward Micro-Expression Visualization for Empathy in Social Interaction 11-20
  Feiyang Yin, Isidro Butaslac, Patrick Gebhard, Monica Perusquía-Hernández, Zhaofeng Niu, Taishi Sawabe, Hirokazu Kato
• Stop Peeking: What Mechanisms Underlie Gaze Awareness? 21-25
  Sophie Glaab
• The Attention-Aware Pipeline: Design Tensions from Making Attention Visible in XR 26-35
  Arvind Srinivasan, Niklas Elmqvist
• Proxemic Cues for Non-Visual Perception of Virtual Humans in Mixed Reality 36-47
  Katja Krug, Kenny Weidemann
• Extended Applications of Augmented Social Influence Through Imposed Synchrony 48-56
  Jiahao Liu, Yilu Sun, Tianqi Liu, Wei-Che Harry Lin, Andrea Stevenson Won

Session 2: AI Agents, Avatars & Identity Infrastructures

• Multimodal Interaction through Embodied Agents: An Intelligent Assistant for Immersive Virtual Environments 57-65
  Muhammad Saad, Muhammad Saeed, Fedwa Laamarti, A.El Saddik
• Agent Personality as Social Augmentation: How AI Traits Shape Human Perception and Decision-Making in XR 66-71
  Taeyeon Kim, Hyeongil Nam, Kangsoo Kim
• Who Is There With Me? User Identity, Avatars, and Authenticity in Social XR 72-77
  Chuyang Zhang, Hyeongil Nam, Kangsoo Kim
• Towards Embodied Identities: Investigating Personalised Avatars with Face Tracking in Social VR 78-87
  Samuel E. R. Thompson, Dominik Lange-Nawka, Burkhard C. Wünsche
• Social Acceptability of Touch: Can a Virtual Agent Touch a Human? 88-95
  Grégoire Richard, Catherine Pelachaud, Indira Thouvenin
• Social Signaling in Augmented Reality 96-101
  Henning Pohl
• The Vibrancy of Social VR Community: A Study on Fantasized Anime Avatars in VRChat 102-116
  Jindong Leo-Liu

Session 3: Social XR for Therapy, Wellbeing & Clinical Training

• Designing Socially Augmented XR for Loneliness: Participatory Insights from Lived Experience 117-124
  Saskia Davies, Tom Owen, Sean Walton
• Social Augmentation for Group Therapy: A Co-located Mixed Reality Experience for Eating Disorder Prevention 125-132
  Jorge Larrosa-Quesada, Samuel Navas-Medrano, Jose Luis Soler-Dominguez, Juliana Rojas-Rincon, Aikaterini Ampatzoglou, María Fernandez Capo, María Gámiz, Bruno Porras, Patricia Pons
• Affective Diary: A Longitudinal Study of a Virtual Reality Diary System for Emotion Expression and Reflection 133-143
  Bingqing Chen, Zihui Qin, Hai-Ning Liang, Yue Li
• From Instruction to Embodiment: Socially Augmented VR for Parenting Skills Rehearsal 144-150
  Sofia Seinfeld, Pierre Bourdin, Adrian Montesano, Ferran Marsà Sambola
• SAVP-XR: Socially-Augmented XR Training with Emotionally Expressive Virtual Patients for Psychology Students 151-160
  Nesrine Mansouri, Makram Soui, Mohammed Naji Aldossari
• Designing Socially Adaptive XR for Exposure Therapy: Telepresence, Personalization, and Real-Time Environmental Modulation 161-168
  Eleni Chrysopoulou, Christina Katsini, George E. Raptis

Session 4: Learning, Inclusion & Structured Social Interaction

• Social Augmentation in Cross-Platform XR: Enabling Collaborative Learning 169-179
  Letícia Lucas, Carla Costa, Pedro Mendes Jorge
• Designing Near-surface AR Interaction for Social Learning of Group Visitors 180-194
  Hyeonbeom Yi, Sunwoo Baek, Sohyun Park, Seung Hyeon Han, Woohun Lee
• Customizing Design Thinking for Social Aware Virtual Reality: Exploring Immersive Empathizing in Co-Design 195-205
  Kalliopi Evangelia Stavroulia, Yiannis Georgiou, Andreas Lanitis
• Designing Social Feedforward for VR Resistance Training: Competition Improves Performance, Friends Improve Enjoyment 206-216
  Zixuan Wang, Mark Billinghurst, Burkhard C. Wünsche
• A Taxonomy of Social Augmentation Mechanisms in VR Exergames: Interaction, Structure, and Agent Representation 217-232
  Zixuan Wang, Mark Billinghurst, Burkhard C. Wünsche
• Peer Relatedness in 3D: A Virtual Reality Paradigm to Simulate and Assess Social Dynamics in Educational Settings 233-242
  Giuseppe De Luca, Martina Benvenuti, Tung Khau, Gerrit Meixner, Dieter Baeyens, Friederike Blume, Elvis Mazzoni
• Exploring Intergroup Dynamics in Multi-User Social Virtual Reality Spaces using AI-driven Analytics 243-251
  Nili Steinfeld, Catherine Dumas, Lukasz Porwol, Reza Jari

Session 5: Foundations, Infrastructure & Societal Implications of Social XR

• Visual-to-Haptic Augmentation in XR: A Wearable Glove for Perceptual Grounding in Multimodal Interaction 252-262
  Mohd Faisal, Hamdi Elsaddik, Erhan Baturay Onural, Jihong Zhang, Fedwa Laamarti, A.El Saddik
• VectionSense: Multimodal Inertial-Physiological Cybersickness Detection in Consumer VR 263-272
  Kompal Layal, Ashish Kumar, Garvit Chugh, Suchetana Chakraborty
• Brahma: an Open Source Library for Cross-platform Social XR and Scientific Visualization 273-277
  Samir Ghosh, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Katherine Isbister
• Towards Structuring Research on Mediated Social Interactions 278-285
  Eloise Minder, Sylvain Fleury, Christophe Guillet, Jean-Rémy Chardonnet
• Connecting Personalized Realities: Challenges and Opportunities in a Personalized Society 286-300
  Jannis Strecker-Bischoff, Luka Bekavac, Simon Mayer, Kenan Bektas
• A "beyond being there" approach to social augmentation in VR/XR 301-307
  Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Anya Osborne, Katherine Isbister
• Understanding Cross-Cultural User Experience in Virtual Reality Across Presence, Emotion, and Interaction 308-318
  Thanh-Thao Sophie Nguyen Thi, Maurizio Vergari, Sebastian Möller, Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons, Tanja Kojić