Meaningful XR 2024

May 23-25, Stanford/Palo Alto, CA

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 from over 30 universities/orgs, 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

Vision

Whether designed to entertain or achieve more "serious" purposes, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR)—collectively “XR”—have implications in a wide range of meaningful domains, such as education, physical health, well-being, and social equity.

Meaningful XR 2024 is a conference for scholars and industry professionals about theory, research, design innovations, principles, and practices related to meaningful uses of XR.

The conference will include thought-provoking keynotes from both academic and industry leaders, peer-reviewed paper presentations, panel sessions, "XRbitions," and social mixers in both VR and meatspace.

Partner Special Issue

In collaboration with the Journal of Media Psychology (JMP), full paper submissions that receive a 'top-paper' designation at Meaningful XR will be automatically (with author consent) considered a “Revise and Resubmit” for publication in the journal’s Metaverse-Mediated Communication Special Issue (CFP: https://bit.ly/jmpmetaverse).

After the conference, the revised papers may be resubmitted to JMP to complete the review process, with attempts made to retain at least one original reviewer.

Schedule Overview

(full schedule HERE)

Thurs (5/23, 8:30am- 8pm):

Full day of sessions at the Stanford Alumni Center incl. breakfast, lunch, and dinner

Friday (5/24, 8:30am-5pm):

Full day of sessions at the Stanford Communication Department plus campus/lab tours; breakfast and lunch provided. Unofficial group dinners.

Saturday (5/25, 9am - ):

Breakfast session in downtown Palo Alto, then optional group outing to San Francisco

Keynote Speakers

Join us for thought-provoking keynotes from leaders in academia and industry working in the field of XR.

Kristine Nowak

Professor, Department of Communication, University of Connecticut

Kristine Nowak (PhD Michigan State University, MA Stanford University) is Professor, former Department Head, and Director of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Connecticut. Her research examines how communication with new technology, including virtual reality and anthropomorphic avatars, influences learning, person perception, and social interactions. Her recent studies, including one of the first longitudinal examinations of VR use in a large class (co-authored with Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab), have examined how best to use virtual reality in lab studies and in the classroom. This work has revealed the importance of training and teaching people to use VR before they can learn with VR, and led her to be awarded the Teaching innovation Award from UConn’s AAUP in 2023. Her work has been published in several flagship journals including the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Computers and Human Behavior, Journal of Communication, Media Psychology, and Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.

Jeremy Bailenson

Professor, Department of Communication, Stanford University

Jeremy Bailenson (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Thomas More Storke Professor in the Department of Communication. Bailenson studies the psychology of Virtual and Augmented Reality, in particular how virtual experiences lead to changes in perceptions of self and others. His lab builds and studies systems that allow people to meet in virtual space, and explores the changes in the nature of social interaction. His most recent research focuses on how virtual experiences can transform education, environmental conservation, empathy, and health. He is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford. He has published more than 200 academic papers in the fields of communication, computer science, education, environmental science, law, marketing, medicine, political science, and psychology. He has published two books, Infinite Realities and Experience on Demand. His work has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation for 20 years.

Aditya Vishwanath

Inspirit, Co-founder & CEO

As the co-founder and CEO of Inspirit, Aditya (PhD, Stanford University) is a visionary in education technology, developing immersive 3D and VR tools for STEM education. His work at the intersection of learning sciences, media, and design has earned him prestigious awards, including the Stanford Knight-Hennessy scholarship and recognition in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Education. A social entrepreneur, Aditya also co-founded MakerGhat, impacting over 6,000 schools in India. With a background at Google Education, he's dedicated to designing innovative educational solutions for diverse learning environments globally.

Matthew Lombard

Co-founder and President of the International Society for Presence Research

Associate Professor & Chair, Lew Klein College of Media & Communication, Temple University

Matthew Lombard (PhD Stanford University) is one of the world's foremost scholars on the concept of (tele)presence. He is Co-founder and President of the International Society for Presence Research, which has been hosting conferences related to extended reality since 1998. His groundbreaking co-authored paper, "At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence" (Lombard & Ditton, 1997), offered a simple but poignant definition of presence ("the perceptual illusion of non-mediation") that has resonated with generations of XR scholars, as evidenced by the nearly 6k citations to date. Lombard’s research continues to center on individuals’ psychological and physiological processing of media presentations and experiences, including (tele)presence but also focusing on social responses to machines and robots. His work has appeared in flagships journals including Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Behaviour & Information Technology, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Conference Organizers

You can thank/blame these people for this event

Rabindra (Robby) Ratan, Michigan State University

Lead organizer -- please direct all constructive criticism to him

David Beyea, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

Lead guest editor of the partner special issue at JMP

Maxwell Foxman, University of Oregon
Alex Leith, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Brian Klebig, Bethany Lutheran College
David Jeong, Santa Clara University
Swati Pandita, California Institute of Technology
Vivian Chen, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Jih-Hsuan Tammy Lin, National ChengChi University
Shay Yao, Georgia State University
Joomi Lee, University of Arkansas

Conference Executive Committee

Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University
Nicholas Bowman, Syracuse University
Magy Seif El-Nasr, University of California, Santa Cruz
Katherine Isbister, University of California, Santa Cruz
Jorge Pena, University of California, Davis