**Important Dates**
Workshop Date: April 13–17, 2026 – TBD
Location: Barcelona, Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona, Spain
Participant submissions abstract due: (on or before) February 12, 2026
Participants notified of acceptance: (on or before) February 25, 2026

1st ACM CHI 2026 Workshop on Shaping Future Human Connection: Social Augmentation through XR Technologies
Exploring How Augmented Social Cues Transform Communication in XR
Extended Reality (XR), including VR, AR, and MR, is rapidly reshaping how humans connect, collaborate, and communicate. Beyond simply replicating face-to-face interaction, XR opens new opportunities for social augmentation, the intentional enhancement or transformation of social and emotional cues to deepen engagement, improve clarity, and support more inclusive experiences. These advances raise important questions about how augmented social cues should be designed, evaluated, and ethically deployed.

This first edition of the workshop brings together researchers, designers, practitioners, and creators to explore the future of Social XR and socially augmented communication. Through two focused 90-minute sessions, participants will engage in a keynote, Mini-Thematic Sessions with joint presentations of accepted abstracts, and hands-on collaborative activities. Discussions and group work will support the co-creation of new concepts, taxonomies, and frameworks for understanding and shaping augmented social cues in XR environments.

By examining design strategies, implementation challenges, and emerging evaluation methods, the workshop aims to build a shared foundation for meaningful, responsible, and socially intelligent XR technologies.

**Topics of Interest**
We invite contributions on Social XR, i.e., XR systems enriched with social and emotional augmentations. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

- Social augmentation techniques for VR, AR, and MR environments

- Adaptive and context-sensitive Social XR systems integrating AI

- Methods for enhancing communication through expressive avatars, gaze cues, or augmented facial expressions

- Multimodal approaches for interpreting and responding to social and affective signals

- Evaluation protocols and metrics for social engagement, trust, empathy, and user experience in Social XR

- Ethical, privacy, inclusivity, and accessibility considerations in socially augmented communication

- Integration of augmented social cues across physical and virtual environments

- Tools, toolkits, and frameworks for prototyping and deploying Social XR applications

- Domain-specific applications: collaborative learning, therapy, remote teamwork, creative practice, performative arts, entertainment

- Innovative strategies for scalable, adaptive, and context-aware social augmentation

**Workshop Format**
Throughout the workshop, participants will take part in:

- Mini-Thematic Sessions with joint presentations of accepted exstended abstracts

Collaborative group activities focusing on concept generation, framework development, and future research pathways

These activities will encourage the exploration of design choices, affective and multimodal communication, evaluation methodologies, and the ethical implications of social augmentation.

Design ideas emerging from collaborative work will not be competitively assessed but will serve as seeds for future research. Participants will be invited to expand these concepts into extended contributions for a possible Special Issue (e.g., in the Empathic Computing Journal ).

**How to Participate**
We invite submissions of extended abstracts (5–9 pages, excluding references) in the single-column CEUR-WS format . Contributions may focus on research, design, implementation, or applied work in areas such as education, healthcare, collaboration, therapy, creative practice, and entertainment.

Submission Types
Extended Abstracts (5–9 pages)Empirical studies, design cases, theoretical perspectives, or speculative proposals. Accepted contributions will appear in CEUR-WS open-access proceedings

Shorter Contributions ((4 pages)Shorter works, early-stage ideas, or brief design concepts. If accepted, they will be included in arXiv rather than CEUR-WS.

**Review Process**
All submissions will be reviewed by at least two domain experts. Evaluation criteria include relevance, quality, clarity, and the potential to stimulate meaningful workshop discussion.

Accepted papers require in-person attendance by at least one author, with registration for both the workshop and the main conference.

**Awards**
To recognize outstanding contributions, the workshop will present three awards:

- Best Extended Abstract – selected by the organizers

- Best Student Extended Abstract – selected by the organizers

- Best Presentation – based on 50% participant voting and 50% organizer evaluation

**Publication Opportunities**
Accepted papers will appear in CEUR-WS open-access proceedings . A possible Special Issue (e.g., Empathic Computing Journal ) may be organized after the workshop; selected contributions may be invited for submission.

Authors of accepted CEUR-WS papers may optionally upload a revised version to arXiv, provided it differs from the CEUR-WS camera-ready version.

**Committees**

Alessandro Visconti – Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy Email: alessandro.visconti@polito.it

Fabrizio Lamberti – Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy Email: fabrizio.lamberti@polito.it

Theophilus Teo – University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes, Australia Email: Theo.Teo@unisa.edu.au

Gun A. Lee – University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia Email: Gun.Lee@unisa.edu.au

Allison K. Jing – RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Email: allison.jing@rmit.edu.au

Kiyoshi Kiyokawa – Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan Email: kiyo@is.naist.jp

Adalberto L. Simeone – KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Email: adalberto.simeone@kuleuven.be

**Contact**
If you have any questions or remarks regarding the workshop, feel free to contact us via email at alessandro.visconti@polito.it