The recent advent of the Metaverse, the market expansion of the game industry, the growing success of virtual and augmented reality in research, training, education, and rehabilitation, the need for realistic simulations of complex scenarios, all show that the non-physical reality where people may meet, play, learn, is becoming more and more important in our daily lives. To make the non-physical reality environments/experience engaging, entertaining, and useful for simulation and training purposes, it should be populated by virtual humans (characters animated by the system) that, in many cases, should interact with avatars (characters acting as representatives or proxies of humans) in a believable, smooth, and rewarding way. Virtual humans are named differently depending on the context: non-player characters in the game context, AI avatars in the metaverse, etc. Whatever the name, in order to be realistic and to reach the goal for which they were designed, they should be autonomous, reactive, and social, and they should exhibit intelligent behavior. In other words, they should be intelligent software agents.  

The purpose of the eXtended Reality & Intelligent Agents workshop, at its second edition this year, is to bring together researchers, engineers, and practitioners interested in exploring the role of intelligent agents in eXtended Reality (XR, that is, virtual, augmented, and mixed reality), and vice versa, embracing a multidisciplinary perspective.

The workshop welcomes papers that propose architectures, methodologies, and tools for integrating intelligent agents and XR systems, as well as already developed case studies and technologies, and more visionary proposals.  

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to: 

Integration of Agents and Multiagent systems and techniques into XR systems

• Cognitive Agents for XR Avatars
• Interaction between agents and humans through virtual worlds
• Pedestrian and Crowd simulations in XR systems
• Autonomous and intelligent XR avatars
• Ambient Intelligent systems and XR
• Methodologies, platforms, tools and libraries for integrating MASs into XR platforms

XR for agents and MAS

• Exploiting virtual worlds as MAS environments
• Perception, locomotion and navigation of agents into XR environments
• Filling the gap between humans and virtual agents thanks to XR
• Exploiting XR simulation for Human & MAS experiments
• Exploiting XR simulation for Human & Robots experiments
• Methodologies, platforms, tools and libraries for integrating XR into MASs

More general aspects

• Conversational agents and XR
• Learning agents/avatars in the XR
• Ethical concerns with Virtual Agents
• Software Engineering aspects (testing, V&V) related to the integration of MAS and XR systems
• Any topic related to the integration/exploitation of MAS and XR

Submission Guidelines

The workshop welcomes contributions that would allow us to solicit the discussion and brainstorming about any relevant aspect related to intelligent agents and multi-agent systems and Extended Reality.

Types of submissions and proceedings: research papers, perspective papers, reviews, and case studies are welcome.

We plan to not have formal proceedings but to publish accepted papers on the workshop website (or linking them from arxiv or any other archival repository, as preferred by the authors). Then, selected accepted papers will be invited to submit an extension of the workshop paper to a Special issue (see details below), which will follow a standard review process. 

In this line, the workshop will accept both short and long papers, as long as they provide enough information for the review process: constructive reviews will be provided, so that authors of accepted papers can prepare their presentation and discussion in the best way, and also take advantage of them to prepare the extended version of the paper for the SI, if invited to submit it.

The manuscript should use the ECAI LaTeX template: since we do not have formal proceedings, we will not be too strict regarding the paper's number of pages, which should be minimum 4 + references and maximum 8 + references.

Papers can be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=xria2025

Special issue

Last year we organized the SI on SN Computer Science: we plan to organise a Special Issue on a high quality journal this year too! More information coming soon!

Committees

General Chairs

• Daniela Briola, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy
• Viviana Mascardi, University of Genova, Italy
• Anne-Hélène Olivier, University of Rennes 2, France

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to the General Chairs