International workshop on multimodal virtual and augmented reality (workshop summary)

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are expected by many to become the next wave of computing with significant impacts on our daily lives. Motivated by this, we organized a workshop on “Multimodal Virtual and Augmented Reality (MVAR)” at the 18th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2016). While current VR and AR installations mostly focus on the visual domain, we expect multimodality to play a crucial role in future, next generation VR/AR systems. The submissions for this workshop reflect the potential of multimodality for VR and AR, illustrate interesting new directions, and pinpoint important issues. This paper gives a short motivation for the workshop and its aim, and summarizes the aforementioned trends and challenges identified from the submissions.