MMVE 2026: How Immersive Media Systems Bring XR Research Together
Published:
Immersive technologies have long ceased to be a niche topic. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality appear across research, industry, education, and healthcare. Yet a central question remains open: How do systems actually come about that not only function technically, but are also meaningful, accessible, and qualitatively convincing for people?
This is precisely the intersection addressed by the international workshop MMVE 2026. The Immersive Reality Lab was represented there by Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons together with Tanja Kojić in an organizational capacity. MMVE 2026 took place from April 4 to 8, 2026 in Hong Kong SAR and was co-located with the ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys 2026). The format aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss new developments around immersive media, XR systems, and their evaluation.
Why workshops like MMVE matter for XR
XR stands for Extended Reality and encompasses Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). The term describes technologies that make digital content experienceable in a spatial and often interactive way. In public perception, the focus tends to be on devices, headsets, or spectacular applications. In research, the perspective is broader.
Good XR does not emerge from powerful hardware alone. What matters is how content is designed, how stable systems run, how users perceive interaction, and how quality can be meaningfully measured. This is precisely why forums are needed where technology, perception, design, and application are considered together. For several years, MMVE has served as such a discussion-oriented forum at the intersection of immersive technology, experience design, perception research, and systems development.
For a research field like immersive media, this is particularly relevant. Many challenges cannot be solved within a single discipline. Anyone developing an XR application for education or healthcare must master not only rendering, tracking, and data processing, but also user experience, accessibility, cognitive load, safety, and context.
The topics MMVE 2026 placed at the center
The 2026 workshop covered a broad range of topics. These included immersive and interactive content, the quality and performance of multimedia systems, questions of perception and interaction in XR, and architectures for immersive systems. Also addressed were accessibility, inclusion, and safety, as well as application domains such as education, healthcare, and social and cultural contexts.
The thematic breadth is particularly noteworthy. Under “immersive media systems” fall not only virtual worlds, but also topics such as latency, scalability, and objective quality metrics. Latency refers to the delay between input and system response — even small delays can disrupt the sense of immediacy in XR or cause discomfort. Quality metrics are methods by which technical or perceived quality can be systematically described.
MMVE 2026 thus made clear that immersive media are not merely a question of content. Equally important are the underlying systems, methodological evaluation, and the question of whether applications are genuinely suited to different people and usage situations. This is also relevant for work at universities, where precisely this combination of technical development, application testing, and evaluation frequently arises.
Who is included in XR — and who is not
A particularly striking impulse of this year’s workshop was the guiding question of who might be left behind as immersive technologies spread. With this, MMVE 2026 deliberately brought the topics of accessibility and participation to the fore. The Call for Papers explicitly emphasized inclusive user interfaces, inclusive evaluation methods, ethical questions, and adaptive XR systems.
This is more than a peripheral concern. XR systems are often developed and tested under ideal conditions: with technically proficient users, in controlled environments, and with clearly defined usage scenarios. In practice, the situation is more complex. People differ in their abilities, experiences, needs, and tolerance levels. A system that works well for a small test group is not automatically usable by a broad population.
A central question therefore is: What makes XR accessible? XR is accessible when systems are designed so that different people can use them safely, understandably, and effectively. This includes barrier-free interfaces, adaptable interaction, transparent evaluation, and consideration of individual prerequisites.
A second question is equally important: Why is technical innovation alone not enough? Technical innovation alone is not enough because immersive systems only succeed when they are also experienced as meaningful, usable, and trustworthy. Good XR connects system performance with user experience — the actual experience during use.
The role of Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons and the Immersive Reality Lab
That Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons served as Technical Program Chair alongside Tanja Kojić as Workshop Chair for MMVE 2026 is professionally consistent. The official workshop page describes Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons with research focuses in user experience, interaction design, extended reality, and the measurement and prediction of user states. Tanja Kojić is listed as a UX researcher with a focus on immersive media and XR.
This combination is characteristic of MMVE. The subject area requires not only contributions on the systems side, but also expertise in perception, behavior, and evaluation methodology. The workshop thus reflects a research logic central to the Immersive Reality Lab: not to regard immersive technologies in isolation as technical artifacts, but as interactive systems whose quality reveals itself in the interplay of human, application, and context.
For students and researchers from adjacent disciplines, this is an important message. Anyone working on XR today almost always moves between computer science, design, psychology, media technology, healthcare applications, or educational research. International workshops like MMVE make visible how strongly these fields have grown together.
Why international workshops matter for research and transfer
Scientific workshops are not merely ancillary events to major conferences. They fulfill their own function. While main conferences often focus more strongly on mature contributions, workshops enable closer exchange on emerging topics, methodological questions, and new perspectives. In dynamic fields like XR, this is decisive.
MMVE explicitly positions itself as a discussion-oriented forum for researchers and practitioners. Submissions were accepted as both full papers and short papers — including contributions on ongoing work or system demonstrations. Accepted contributions were archived as part of the ACM MMSys 2026 proceedings in the ACM Digital Library. This combines openness to new ideas with scientific visibility.
A further question can therefore be answered clearly: What does a workshop like MMVE concretely bring to XR research? It brings above all exchange, visibility, and thematic sharpening. It helps to bring together technical developments, evaluation methods, and societal questions at an early stage, thereby developing sustainable research directions.
Conclusion: XR needs technology, evaluation, and responsibility
MMVE 2026 demonstrates clearly in which direction the field of immersive media is developing. At the center stand not only new systems, but also the quality of experience, the evaluation of performance, accessibility for different user groups, and responsibility toward real application contexts. This is precisely where the scientific relevance of the workshop lies.
The Immersive Reality Lab’s involvement in the organization through Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons underlines the importance of these topics for current XR research. Anyone seeking to meaningfully advance immersive technologies must consider system design, user experience, and societal participation together. The coming years will show which methods, applications, and standards emerge from this. What is already clear: the future of XR is determined not only in the laboratory, but also in the quality of exchange between disciplines.