New publications at XR Salento 2026

@inproceedings{Schrottenbacher:et:al:2026:a,
  author    = {Schrottenbacher, Patrick and Mehler, Alexander and Bernhardt, Vivienne
               and Rohe, Leon and Abrami, Giuseppe},
  title     = {ReEmote: Towards Emotion Representation in {VR} Through {Va.Si.Li}-Lab},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of XR Salento 2026},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Springer International Publishing}
  keywords  = {VR, XR, affective computing, virtual humans, emotion detection},
  abstract  = {Human social interactions are inherently multimodal, shaped not
               only by what speakers convey but also by cues such as facial expressions,
               posture, and gestures. Together, these channels shape both participants'
               perceptions and behaviors, further reinforcing conversational
               feedback loops. This multimodal system extends to VR, where avatars
               serve as proxies for human interaction, making both visual and
               auditory fidelity essential for engaging. To properly utilize
               the emotional expression space that virtual environments allow,
               we introduce ReEmote. ReEmote extends the capabilities of Va.Si.Li-Lab,
               a collaborative, multi-user VR platform built on Ubiq. While Va.Si.Li-Lab
               supports user emotional expression through facial and hand tracking,
               ReEmote extends this by introducing schema-based emotion mappings
               that affect both avatars and their environments. This fosters
               immersive, emotionally aware environments that are beneficial
               for human and chatbot agent interactions, where human users and
               virtual agents share an emotional expression space. By enabling
               richer emotional dynamics, ReEmote opens up new ways of designing
               affective and engaging virtual experiences.In this paper, we describe
               the design choices behind ReEmote and present an evaluation of
               the graphical validity of the emotion representation introduced
               by ReEmote. Our results indicate that emotions can be validly
               represented through avatar facial expressions that users can quickly
               identify as Ekman's basic emotions.This opens up several possibilities
               for extending emotion-related text-to-speech (TTS) applications
               in Extended Reality (XR) with ReEmote. The paper also outlines
               use cases for XR-based TTS applications.},
  note      = {accepted}
}