The Roles of the Collaborative eXtended Reality in the New Social Era

Dear Colleagues,

The presence of the COVID-19 pandemic has characterized the last few years. The consequences of this health emergency have accelerated the evolution of new technologies that have made it possible to feel less distance between people. Consequently, new collaborative tools started to emerge, supporting the social sphere from various points of view, e.g.: work, leisure, education, etc. However, classical collaborative tools based on remote video meetings are characterized by poor presence feeling. eXtended Reality (XR) has the potential to reduce this gap through the involvement of all technologies that can remove the boundaries between the digital and the physical world.

XR aided the development of solutions based on Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality which has transformed how people interact, work and communicate. Today the term XR is closely related to the Metaverse concept. It represents a collaborative and content-authoring platform that involves social media, video games, virtual meeting rooms, meeting places, etc. Furthermore, XR has allowed a paradigm like spatial computing to evolve rapidly. Indeed, through the scanning of real environments using new tools based on photogrammetry, laser scanning, lidar, RGB-D camera, and so on, computers are more and more aware of physical environments and can use this knowledge to blend digital and real worlds and connect users by providing innovative interaction methods.

This Special Issue aims to communicate and disseminate recent tools, methodologies, and pipelines related to the collaborative and/or authoring XR-based platforms. The goal is to show how XR can radically transform social interaction in any context. We specifically welcome papers containing original and mature research on XR applications based on collaboration and content authoring. A particular focus is given to everything concerning XR-based spatial computing technologies and their applicability in the most varied social contexts (e.g. work, entertainment, leisure, education, etc.).

The proposed special issue matches most of the goals of the MDPI Journal of Imaging, in particular:

• Original research studies of XR and real-time visualization
• Computer graphics and animation, human-computer interaction
• Gaming

The topics of interest include:

• XR-based collaborative architectures
• Collaborative authoring tools 
• New models to evaluate the impact of the XR 
• Human-Computer interaction techniques to interact in collaborative environments
• Spatial computing technologies for shared creation scenes
• Emerging Technologies and Applications for collaborative XR-based environments
• Proof-of-Concept in collaborative environments: Experimental prototyping and testbeds

Dr. Nicola Capece
Prof. Dr. Ugo Erra
Prof. Dr. Lucio Tommaso De Paolis
Dr. Giuseppe Caggianese
Guest Editors

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