The main program of IEEE AIxVR will also feature special sessions providing the opportunity for a more focused view on a topic related to the conference theme. Special sessions at IEEE AIxVR 2024 include:

• Special session "AI for VR/AR"
• Special session "VR/AR for AI"
• Special session "Computational Creativity in VR and AR"
• Special session "AI and/or XR for Training and Education"

Special session papers can be up to 8 pages long (excluding references) and will be published in IEEE Xplore. See detailed submission instructions below.

SPECIAL SESSIONS ON "AI for VR/AR" and "VR/AR for AI"

Chairs: Misha Sra (UC Santa Barbara), Jonathan Ventura (California Polytechnic State University)

IEEE AIVR is all about bringing people together who have an interest in AI, VR/AR, or both and creating new communities related to these exciting research domains. To foster this, we are organizing two special sessions targeted towards people doing research in either of these fields that can potentially be of relevance for people from other communities.

Papers describing AI-related research that is of potential benefit for people from the VR/AR community are encouraged to submit their work to the special session "AI for VR/AR". The research does not has to address VR/AR aspects already, as long as it can trigger interests for people from these communities. Likewise, we invite people who are focusing mostly on VR/AR technologies and applications to submit their work to the special session "VR/AR for AI". Research suitable for this session ranges from technical innovations, to user studies including perception and experiences, to new usages of VR/AR.

Scope of the special session: Our aim is to foster discussion between AI and VR/AR researchers. Hence, any kind of research is welcome that is of potential benefit for the other community. For example, if you are working on AI technologies that could potentially be useful for VR/AR systems, the special session "AI for VR" provides a forum to present your work to the VR/AR community. Likewise, you can use these special sessions to gain feedback from the other communities for your research. For example, if you are eager to get input of how AI could be used to improve your VR/AR system, you can use the special session "VR for AI" to present your work to the AI community to gain feedback from them and maybe even establish future research collaborations.

SPECIAL SESSION ON "Computational Creativity in VR and AR"

Chairs: Bhojan Anand (National University of Singapore), Chedy Raissi (Riot Games)

Computational creativity is an emerging field of research within AI that focuses on the capacity of machines to both generate and evaluate novel outputs that would, if produced by a human, be considered creative. Seamless integration of virtual and real word and immersive nature of AR and VR has made these platforms powerful to build, express, understand, support and evaluate human creativity in multiple disciplines such as medicine, architecture, education, creative arts and engineering. Computational Creativity for Virtual and Augmented Reality (CCVAR) is multidisciplinary area that includes artificial intelligence, system design, virtual reality, cognitive psychology, philosophy, the arts.

The objective of this special session is to bring together AR/VR researchers from academic and industry to work towards the vision of using AI to generate AR/VR contents (eg. generating possible avatars, maps, words, dialogs, music) that support human creativity and building applications to understand and enhance human creativity. For example an AI supported creativity process may take prompts/images to describe an avatar and generates a range of novel 2D or 3D avatar models that supports the artists in the creative thinking process and design.

Scope of the special session: We invite researchers to submit original, high-quality research papers that address creativity in VR/AR systems and frameworks. The special session welcomes both technical papers and position papers, and authors may also submit work in progress in the areas including, but not limited to:

• AR/VR applications in specific domains such as, games (procedural generation of contents), education (automated answering, contents for educational/serious games, simulation of physics/engineering experiments), procedural generation of music, text/voice based dialogs, animation, 3D models including humanoid characters and expressive animation (gaze, gestures, ...), intelligent interaction (UX), visual arts, graphic design, product design, architecture, entertainment computing, scientific discovery, and programming.
• VR/AR frameworks that allow for co-creativity between humans and machines, in which the machine is more than a mere tool and takes on significant creative responsibility for itself. For example, Multi-users VR/AR graffiti creating with machine intelligence.
• Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Big data approaches that support or produce creativity in VR/AR systems.. Cloud and 5G edge computing based systems and services that can be used to foster creative behavior in VR/AR systems. Methodologies for understating and evaluation of creativity in VR/AR systems, and for the evaluation of how such systems are perceived in society.
• Resource development and data gathering/knowledge curation for creative systems for VR/AR (eg, global AR mapping data for context aware creative contents), especially resources, and data collections that are scalable, extensible, and freely available as open-source materials.
• Ethical and Social considerations in the design, deployment, or testing of machine creativity in VR/AR systems.

SPECIAL SESSIONS ON "AI and/or XR for Training and Education"

Chairs: Wolfgang Hürst (Utrecht University), Min-Chun Hu (National Tsing Hua University)

In recent years, both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and eXtended Reality (XR) have started to become widely used in learning and education. For example, simulations and serious games help students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) to better understand abstract concepts or observe science phenomena more easily. Immersive sports learning/training in VR allows athletes to repeatedly practice with controlled configurations just like they do on the field or court. Sensor and AI technologies can be used to monitor the behavior of learners or trainees and further infer their learning or training effectiveness. This special session aims to provide an interdisciplinary platform for researchers to discuss their AI and/or XR-related work in the context of learning, education, and serious gaming from both scientific and educational perspectives.

Scope of the special session: Relevant topics include, but are not limited to analyses and applications of the following areas:

Simulations and serious games for learning,education and training.

Immersive sports training and exercising.

Intelligent tutoring systems.

AI-based learning performance monitoring and evaluation.

Behavior analysis in the context of training and learning.

AI models of gaze analysis, emotion analysis, and mental states analysis.

Learning/training data visualization and analysis in XR.

Development of new application scenarios and new prospects utilizing AI and/or XR in the context of learning.