Meaningful XR

Meaningful XR 2024 was a success!

The MXR24 conference was characterized by 2.5 days (27+ hours) of spectacular presentations, intellectual conversations, and exciting (but safe!) social events. With ~90 participants, MXR hit a sweet spot in size: small enough for sufficiently long convos, large enough to meet many new people. We also supported virtual attendance with an OBS capture of the main conference room Zoom plus screenshare streamed to our VR Chat world, which some attendees viewed in VR headsets. …about right for Meaningful XR. 

HUGE thank you to our sponsors:

Stanford’s Communication Department (James Hamilton and Jeremy Bailenson) was our sponsoring host. MSU’s Dept. of Media and Information (Mike Stern) & SPARTIE Lab (my lab) were the lead organizing sponsors. The Journal of Media Psychology (Nick Bowman) was our partner journal. Tokyo Dome Corporation (Kaori Nishibayashi), Annenberg Virtual Reality ColLABorative (Katerina Girginova), and NTU’s FATCAT Lab (Benjy Li) were our Hiro Protagonist-level sponsors. UC Davis Department of Communication (Jorge Peña), U of Arkansas Department of Communication (Joomi Lee), University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (Kun Xu), and Georgia State University Department of Communication (Shay Yao) were our Wade Watts-level sponsors, and Oberon Technologies (Vi Kellersohn) was our Neo Anderson-level sponsor. 

We were also supported by a National Science Foundation Grant, “FW-HTF-R: Collaborative Research: Virtual Meeting Support for Enhanced Well-Being and Equity for Game Developers” (2128803), which provided 18 students with travel scholarships! Speaking of, none of this would have to fruition without my core leadership team. Max Foxman, David Beyea, Alex Leith, and Brian Klebig and I started doing research together on VR in 2019, which led to this grant, which led to this conference. To Max, for checking every detail, David, for running our partner special issue, Alex, for running our awesome virtual attendance set up, Brian, for having my back on all the things, and all of you, for weekly ~10pm meetings helping me pen these long MXR emails, you are very much appreciated!

I would also like to express infinite gratitude to the yellow-lanyarded (mostly MSU student) volunteers, Dayeoun Jang, my PhD advisee, for designing the badges and signs, Kimberly Kersten Williams, Heather Brown, Mark DeZutti, and Patty Yablonski for all things admin at MSU and Stanford, and Matthieu Chartier and Frederic Coget for Fourwaves, an excellent one-stop-shop platform solution which supported many aspects of the conference (paper submission, reviewing, registration). 

And of course, thanks to the speakers, exhibitors, reviewers, attendees, lurkers, and even that one person who snuck in for ice cream! 

We are excited about running annual MXR conferences for years to come! If you are interested in joining the community to support these conferences, please let me know.

Thank you,

Rabindra (Robby) Ratan 

Chair, MXR 2024

Associate Professor and AT&T Endowed Chair

Michigan State University