In a joint effort with the EU H2020 ImAc and Hyper360 projects, VRTogether co-organized the “First International Workshop on Tools for Creating XR Media Experiences”, co-located with the IEEE ICME 2020 conference, that was planned to be originally held in London (6-10 July). Due to COVID-19, all tracks and side events of the conference were held virtually, and Zoom was selected as the tool to run the workshop on July 6th.

Mario Montagud (i2CAT), Pablo Cesar (CWI) and Dimitris Zarpalas (CERTH) were Organizers of the Workshop, together with Hannes Fassold (JOANNEUM RESEARCH).

The workshop revolved around very relevant topics for VRTogether, which are new approaches, technologies and tools for creating, processing and delivering interactive XR media. It was quite successful, gathering up to 6 relevant contributions from the community on these topics, which fostered rich discussions and interaction. The workshop also included a fascinating opening keynote by Professor Aljosa Smolic (Trinity College Dublin), entitled “Volumetric Video Content Creation for Immersive AR/VR Experiences”, and a very interesting invited talk by Leen Segers (LucidWeb) about XR4ALL project, entitled “XR4ALL – Moving the European XR tech industry forward”.

The workshop was also quite successful in terms of number of attendees, which approximately ranged between 30 and 40 during its evolution.

More information about the program, chairs and presented contributions can be found at the workshop website.

Overall, given the success and the awakened interest, the possibility of organizing a second edition in 2021 – hopefully a physical one – will be assessed in short!

Author: Mario Montagud, i2CAT

Come and follow us in this VR journey with i2CAT, CWI, TNO, CERTH, Artanim, Viaccess-Orca, TheMo and Motion Spell.