News

The SURF Tech Trends report is a bi-annual report and provides insight into the most important digital trends to help them make the right innovation choices in a complex world. The trend report covers ten important topics, such as artificial intelligence (AI), cyber security, Web3 and quantum computing, and outlines the five most important trends for each. Immersive technology – or eXtended Reality – was one of those topics. 

Published 08/10/2025

The international ACM conference Multimedia System (MMSys) 2025, a premier conference on multimedia systems, was successfully co-organised by Silvia Rossi, researcher of the DIS group.

Published 08/10/2025

New paper published in the Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on IMmersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE) and to presented at MMVE 2025, workshop co-located with ACM MMsys 2025.
 

• Varun Pradhan, Silvia Rossi, and Pablo Cesar. 2025. "Exploring Entropy-Based Solutions for Trajectory Prediction in Virtual Reality". In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on IMmersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 15–21.
  DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1145/3712677.3720460
   

Published 08/10/2025

New paper published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and to be presented at IEEE VR 2025.
 

•  Xuemei Zhou, Irene Viola, Silvia Rossi and Pablo Cesar, "Comparison of Visual Saliency for Dynamic Point Clouds: Task-free vs. Task-dependent," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 2964-2974, 2025.
  DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2025.3549863

Published 03/02/2025

New journal paper published in ACM TOMM, special issue MMsys 23:

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• Silvia Rossi, Irene Viola, Laura Toni, and Pablo Cesar. 2024. A Clustering Approach to Unveil User Similarities in 6-DoF Extended Reality Applications. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applicationshttps://doi.org/10.1145/3701734

Published 31/10/2024

Together with Irene Viola, Thomas Röggla, Omar Niamut and Pablo Cesar, I am one of the organisers of the third edition of the spring school on Social XR which takes place from April 7th to 10th 2025 at CWI in Amsterdam.

Published 31/10/2024

New paper presented at ACM Multimedia (MM'24) in the open source and software track.

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• Jack Jansen, Thomas Röggla, Silvia Rossi, Irene Viola, and Pablo Cesar. 2024. Open-Sourcing VR2Gather: A Collaborative Social VR System for Adaptive Multi-Party Real Time Communication. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 11210–11213. https://doi.org/10.1145/3664647.3685515
   

Published 31/10/2024

CWI’s Distributed and Interactive Systems group showcases several of its research results in eXtended Reality (XR) in the May 2024 issue of the European ERCIM News magazine.

Recently, ERCIM News 137  was published, with a special theme on eXtended Reality (XR). CWI’s Distributed and Interactive Systems group contributed four articles to this special theme.

The topics are the results of several national and international collaborations:

• VOXReality : Voice-driven Interactions in XR Spaces

• VR2Gather : A Platform for Adaptive Multiparty Social xR Communication

• 5DCulture : Fashion Exhibition and Social Virtual Reality

• TRANSMIXR : Enabling the future of Media Experiences through Social XR

Published 23/05/2024

The workshop MMVE, co-located with ACM MMSys 2024, a premier conference on multimedia systems, was successfully organised by two CWI researcher of the DIS group.

Published 26/04/2024

New paper presented at MMVE 2024, workshop co-located with ACM MMSys 2024 in Bari.
 

•  Thomas Röggla, David A. Shamma, Julie R. Williamson, Irene Viola, Silvia Rossi, and Pablo Cesar. 2024. A Platform for Collecting User Behaviour Data during Social VR Experiments Using Mozilla Hubs. In Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Immersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 41–44. 
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3652212.3652225

Published 26/04/2024

Together with Irene Viola, Thomas Röggla, Omar Niamut and Pablo Cesar, Silvia is one of the organisers of the second edition of the spring school on Social XR which took place from March 4th to 8th 2024 at CWI in Amsterdam.

Published 12/03/2024

New paper published in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and presented at IEEE VR 2024.

 

•  S. Lee et al., "Designing and Evaluating a VR Lobby for a Socially Enriching Remote Opera Watching Experience," in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics,
  DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2024.3372081
   

Published 12/03/2024

[Interview on Academic Position]

When we think of the concept of ‘living in the future’, there is perhaps no technology that encapsulates this more than virtual reality (VR) and other immersive media. 

Published 05/01/2024

[Interview on UCL Electronic and Electrical Engineering]

Silvia chats to us about how her interest in multimedia developed, her experience doing a PhD at EEE and her current research on user behaviour in virtual reality (VR).

Published 27/11/2023

[Article on UCL Electronic and Electrical Engineering​]

UCL Electronic and Electrical Engineering PhD alumni, Silvia Rossi, received the ACM SIGMM Award for her thesis on user interactivity in VR systems.

Published 27/11/2023

[Article on CWI​ and DIS website]

Researcher Silvia Rossi (DIS group) has been awarded the SIGMM 2023 award for outstanding PhD thesis during the ACM International conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2023) in Ottawa, Canada.

Published 21/11/2023

[Article on CWI​ and DIS website]

Research carried out by the Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) has resulted in contributions to this year's ACM Multimedia Conference.

Published 31/10/2023

[Interview on CWI​]

Interview on CWI website on these of the personal space and navigation in Social VR.

Published 19/10/2023

[Article on CWI​ and DIS website]

During the Dutch Media Week, postdoctoral researcher Silvia Rossi was one of the speakers at the program Cross Media Café on Spatial computing. She brought a scientific perspective talking about her work on understanding user behaviour in XR.

Published 17/10/2023

Silvia, together with Debora M. C. Saade (UFF, Brazil) and Thomas Röggla (CWI, The Netherlands), will be the general chair of the 16th edition of the international workshop on IMmersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE). MMVE '24 is co-located with MMSys 2024, a premier conference on multimedia systems and will take place on April 15th-18th, 2024 in Bari, Italy. It .

Published 17/10/2023