XR4ED Invited Talk at UnitedXR Europe 2025

On the 8^th of December 2025, I presented at UnitedXR Europe in Brussels an overview and results of the XR4ED EU Project. XR4ED focuses on fostering innovation in education through extended reality (XR) technologies. The project created a sustainable, centralised platform where educators, developers, and learners can access XR tools, applications, and resources tailored for learning and training purposes. By uniting the EdTech and XR communities across multiple EU member states, XR4ED overcomes fragmentation in the digital education technology ecosystem and supports the development and market readiness of immersive educational solutions that go beyond traditional teaching methods.

Throughout the presentation, project results are highlighted, including efforts to create an open marketplace for XR content, support for start-ups and SMEs via open calls and grants, and building links with related initiatives to strengthen Europe’s leadership in XR for education. The XR4ED platform is designed to enable personalised, innovative, and inclusive learning experiences, facilitating hands-on engagement and skills-based teaching. XR4ED also considers ethical, privacy, and inclusivity standards as part of its ecosystem, while encouraging adoption of immersive tools across schools, universities, industry training, and research communities.

More information:

https://youtu.be/tAi76BlXWis

ISMAR 2025 Article

Recently, a paper I co-authored with colleagues from CYENS was presented at 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) in Daejeon, Korea. The paper is entitled "VR as a 'Drop-In' Well-Being Tool for Knowledge Workers" and explores how VR can meet the diverse physical and mental needs of knowledge workers. We developed Tranquil Loom, a VR app offering stretching, guided meditation, and open exploration across four environments. The app includes an AI assistant that suggests activities based on users’ emotional states.

We conducted a two-phase mixed-methods study: (1) interviews with 10 knowledge workers to guide the apps design, and (2) deployment with 35 participants gathering usage data, well-being measures, and interviews. Results showed increases in mindfulness and reductions in anxiety. Participants enjoyed both structured and open-ended activities, often using the app playfully. While AI suggestions were used infrequently, they prompted ideas for future personalization. Overall, participants viewed VR as a flexible, 'dropin' tool, highlighting its value for situational rather than prescriptive well-being support.

More information:

https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/ismar/2025/876100b213/2byA7RS10ze

MTI 2024 Article

Recently, I co-authored an open-access journal paper that was published at Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, sponsored by the MDPI. The paper is entitled “Extended Reality Educational System with Virtual Teacher Interaction for Enhanced Learning”. The paper introduces an interactive XR intelligent assistant featuring a virtual teacher that interacts dynamically with PowerPoint presentations using OpenAI’s ChatGPT API.

It incorporates multilingual speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities, custom lip-syncing solutions, eye gaze, head rotation and gestures. Panoramic images can be used as a sky box giving the illusion that the AI assistant is located at another location. Findings from three pilots indicate that the proposed technology has a lot of potential to be used as an additional tool for enhancing the learning process.

More information:

https://www.mdpi.com/2414-4088/8/9/83

IEEE CG&A Article

Recently, a co-authored article entitled ‘XR4ED: An Extended Reality Platform for Education’ was published at IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. It presents the overall architecture and objectives of the EU-funded project dedicated to XR for education, called Extended Reality for Education (XR4ED). The goal is to provide a platform where educators will be able to build XR teaching experiences without the need to have programming or 3D modeling expertise.

The article describes the platform and focuses on a key aspect of collaborative and social XR, which is the use of avatars. We show initial results on a) a marketplace which is used for populating educational content into XR environments, b) an intelligent augmented reality assistant that communicates between nonplayer characters and learners, and c) self-avatars providing nonverbal communication in collaborative VR.

More information:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10640174

ERCIM News XR4ED Article 2024

Recently, a co-authored article entitled ‘Extended Reality Intelligent Assistant for Education’ was published at ERCIM News. The article introduces an intelligent Extended Reality (XR) teaching assistant communicating with the users in natural language. The application uses artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) to understand and communicate with the students using realistic-looking avatars with body language. Teachers can customise the application by adding their slides to be taught or choosing a teaching topic that will be discussed by two intelligent agents.

Although the application is primarily presented in an AR environment, it offers a panoramic image mode that can optionally be used to surround the user in the XR space. This shift towards VR along the MR spectrum brings more immersion and is especially suitable for certain learning scenarios, e.g. featuring learning about historical sites, natural ecosystems, or other content that is bound to a place. The XR Intelligent Assistant has been implemented on Magic Leap 2 AR head-mounted display (HMD) and for Android for usage on phones.

More information:

https://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en137/special/extended-reality-intelligent-assistant-for-education