CHI 2026: XR Research from the Immersive Reality Lab
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The most pressing questions in human-computer interaction often arise where technology must be not just convenient, but reliable. That is precisely what the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is about — the world’s leading conference in human-computer interaction. CHI 2026 takes place from April 13 to 17, 2026 in Barcelona at the Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona (CCIB). For the Immersive Reality Lab, this year’s edition is particularly relevant: several lab members are represented with contributions in thematically strong XR workshops.
What makes CHI so important? CHI is not just a conference for new interfaces or design trends. It is a forum where debates unfold about how digital systems should be embedded in everyday life, work, and society. Being visible there means placing research within an international discourse on how technologies can be designed to be understandable, responsible, and human-centered. For a lab with a focus on immersive media, quality of experience, and digital health, this is a central resonance space.
Why CHI 2026 Is Particularly Exciting for XR
Extended Reality — XR for short — encompasses Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality. The term describes technologies that make digital content spatially experienceable or embed it into the physical environment. In many discussions, XR is still primarily associated with demonstrators, entertainment, or technical immersion. At CHI 2026, however, a different emphasis emerges: XR is increasingly treated as a serious tool for demanding work and decision-making contexts.
A particularly strong example is the workshop “XR for Challenging Environments: Enabling Human Performance and Agency under Stress”, taking place on April 14, 2026 in Room 124 of the CCIB. The workshop argues that XR in high-risk environments cannot simply aim to work “seamlessly”. Instead, systems must be trustworthy, resilient, and explainable. The organizers articulate three perspective shifts: from generic trust to calibrated trust, from seamless perfection to resilience-by-design, and from abstract transparency to situated explainability. In total, 22 high-quality submissions were accepted.
Two Contributions on Mission-Critical XR
The Immersive Reality Lab is represented in this workshop with two accepted papers. The first, by Alia Saad and Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons, XR Training in Challenging Environments: The Wind Turbines Case, uses wind turbine maintenance as a case study for demanding training environments. The core point is clear: in safety-critical contexts, pure immersion is not enough. Training must also account for environmental conditions, confined spaces, physical exertion, and team coordination. The paper outlines how XR can be combined with digital twins, physiological sensing, and adaptive scenario control to enable controlled risk exposure and context-sensitive feedback.
This is scientifically compelling because several current research strands converge here. A digital twin is a digital model of a real installation or environment. When connected to XR, training scenarios can be made more realistic, variable, and at the same time more controlled. Adding physiological sensing — capturing stress responses or physical load — enables a training system not only to observe what people do, but also to better understand when demands are too high, too low, or poorly distributed. Precisely at this intersection of technology, human performance, and safety, a forward-looking research field is emerging.
The second paper, When Simulation Meets Physiology: Adaptive Resilience for Mission-Critical XR in Fast-Jet Training by Julia Schorlemmer, Alia Saad, Sebastian Möller, and Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons, sharpens this perspective further. The focus is fast-jet training as an extreme case of mission-critical XR. The paper shows that classic XR goals — maximizing immersion or automation — can actually become problematic in such settings. When physiological limits, sensor uncertainty, or misleading feedback are not made visible, a system can undermine training validity rather than support performance. The paper proposes an adaptive resilience layer built on physiology-informed calibration, transparent uncertainty communication, cautious adaptation, and situationally comprehensible feedback.
A frequently asked question can be answered directly: What is mission-critical XR? Mission-critical XR refers to immersive systems deployed in safety-relevant or high-load situations where malfunctions, misunderstandings, or overtrust can have serious consequences. What matters is not only usability, but the system’s ability to remain comprehensible and reliable even under stress.
From Trust in Technology to Human Agency
Both contributions share a common thread: good XR systems should not displace the human, but strengthen their capacity to act. In HCI research, this is often captured by the concept of agency — the ability to act deliberately, make decisions, and effectively shape one’s situation. In challenging environments, this is central. A system that makes recommendations but conceals its uncertainty can be more dangerous than one that openly acknowledges its limitations.
This is also where the connection to Quality of Experience lies. Quality of Experience — QoE for short — describes the perceived quality of a technical system from the user’s perspective. In mission-critical contexts, it is not enough for a system to look impressive or feel smooth. What matters is whether people can trust it appropriately, whether they understand it under load, and whether the interaction genuinely supports their performance. The lab’s contributions shift the focus from pure immersion toward human-centered performance and safety research.
A Third Focus: Social Interaction and Cultural Differences in VR
Alongside the workshop on challenging environments, the lab is also represented in the CHI workshop “Shaping Future Human Connection: Social Augmentation through XR Technologies”. Listed as an accepted CHI workshop, it takes place on Monday, April 13, 2026 in Barcelona. The focus is on how XR can not only replicate social and emotional signals, but actively augment them — through expressive avatars, gaze cues, adaptive feedback, or more inclusive forms of communication.
The contribution “Understanding Cross-Cultural User Experience in Virtual Reality Across Presence, Emotion, and Interaction” fits directly here. The work examines how people with different cultural backgrounds perceive VR experiences. Notably, cultural differences manifest not only in explicit ratings, but also in emotional responses and hedonic quality of experience. In short: XR is not automatically universal. Anyone developing immersive systems for international, diverse, or public use must account for cultural differences in experience.
An important question can be answered directly: Why does cultural diversity matter for VR design? Because users interpret immersive content differently, assess it emotionally in different ways, and may find it engaging or disorienting depending on their cultural background. Designing VR for broad audiences means shaping not only the technology, but also its cultural accessibility.
What Remains from Barcelona
The Immersive Reality Lab’s participation in CHI 2026 is more than a visibility success. It reflects where XR research is currently heading: less about the novelty effect of immersive technologies, and more about robust answers to real demands. How do people train in risky environments? How can trust and uncertainty be meaningfully designed? How can XR become more socially intelligent and culturally sensitive?
It is precisely this combination of technical innovation, human-centered evaluation, and societal relevance that makes these contributions resonant across research, teaching, and transfer. For students, they demonstrate that XR is a serious research field with substantial methodological depth. For colleagues, they illustrate how HCI, physiology, design, and application domains are converging. And for a wider public, they make visible that immersive systems become especially important where people must make sound decisions under pressure.