We invite submissions to the 2nd International Workshop on XR for Challenging Environments (XR4CE), a satellite event of EuroXR 2026 and VWA Forum 2026. Continuing the conversation on how XR can best support the fulfilment of mission-critical work, the event will be held in Valencia, Spain.

Workshop Theme: From Co-existence to Collaboration
Challenging environments such as emergency response, public safety, advanced manufacturing, or space missions demand high levels of human performance under stress. This workshop investigates how XR-based training, assistance and augmentation can support people working in high-stakes, uncertain, and demanding contexts. To successfully address this challenge, enabling and nurturing active collaboration among actors (practitioners, researchers, technologies, systems) is essential.

To this end, we welcome 2-4 page position papers featuring novel concepts, empirical findings, provocative statements, or case studies addressing topics including:

* The Augmented Professional: Cognitive load, skill evolution, and human agency in mission-critical XR use.
* Human-AI Teaming: Moving beyond AI as a tool toward AI as a team member - shared situational awareness, role negotiation, and real-time coordination in high-stakes XR environments.
* Multi-Agent Coordination: Design challenges for environments where humans, robots, and AI agents share the same operational and information space without stepping on each other.
* Multi-Stakeholder Design: Co-designing XR for challenging environments with operators, managers, regulators, and end-users as active participants rather than informants.
* XR as a Collaboration Medium: Using XR to support shared awareness and communication among distributed or co-located teams in challenging environments.
* Cross-Domain Knowledge Transfer: What emergency medicine can learn from military XR, what industrial operations can borrow from healthcare - and how to make that transfer systematic.
* Design for Operational Deployment: Building XR systems that hold up under field realities: degraded communications, physical stress, time pressure, and environmental uncertainty.
* Transfer of Training: Which skills, habits, and mental models carry over from XR training to live deployment, and which break down under real operational conditions?
* Researcher-Practitioner Partnership: Structures and formats that enable genuine two-way learning between academic researchers and field experts, beyond one-off consultation.
* Cross-Disciplinary Research Integration: How HCI, AI, cognitive science, and domain practice can move from parallel work toward genuinely integrated XR4CE-related research agendas.
* Case Studies: XR-in-use experiences and lessons learned from emergency response, industrial operations, healthcare, and other challenging environments.

Important Dates:
* Submission deadline: Sep 23, 2026 (AoE)
* Notifications of acceptance: Oct 5, 2026
* Workshop event: Nov 3, 2026 (morning)

Submission Format:
* 2–4 page position papers (see workshop website for details)

Website: https://xr4ce-eur26.tech-experience.at

Organizers:
* Raimund Schatz, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
* Helmut Schrom-Feiertag, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
* Lea Skorin-Kapov, University of Zagreb
* Jan-Niklas Voigt-Antons, Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences (HSHL)
* Leif Oppermann, Fraunhofer FIT & Virtual Worlds Association