Keynote
Mark Billinghurst
About the Speaker:
Mark Billinghurst is Director of the Empathic Computing Laboratory, and Professor at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia, and also at the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. He earned a PhD in 2002 from the University of Washington and conducts research on how virtual and real worlds can be merged, publishing over 650 papers on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, remote collaboration, Empathic Computing, and related topics. In 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2019 was given the ISMAR Career Impact Award in recognition for lifetime contribution to AR research and commercialization. In 2022 he was selected for the ACM SIGCHI Academy, for leading human-computer interaction researchers, and also selected for the IEEE VGTC VR Academy for leading VR researchers.
Kiyoshi Kiyokawa
About the Speaker:
Kiyoshi Kiyokawa is a Professor at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), where he leads the Cybernetics and Reality Engineering (CARE) Laboratory. He is a distinguished researcher in virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and human augmentation. Professor Kiyokawa received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from NAIST in 1996 and 1998, respectively. His career includes positions as an Associate Professor at Osaka University, a researcher at the Communications Research Laboratory (now NICT), and a visiting scholar at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Laboratory. His significant contributions have been recognized with numerous accolades, including the 2022 IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award, the inaugural 2022 IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Service Award, and the title of Fellow from the Virtual Reality Society of Japan (VRSJ).
Professor Kiyokawa's research has resulted in several pioneering technical achievements. He is known for developing advanced head-mounted display (HMD) systems, including ELMO, the first occlusion-capable optical see-through HMD in 1999. His foundational work also includes VLEGO, one of the first collaborative immersive modelers, and SeamlessDesign, which featured the first transitional interface for switching between VR and AR. His research extends to vision augmentation and assistive interfaces, collaborative virtual and augmented reality, and innovative multimodal interfaces.
Beyond his research, Professor Kiyokawa has demonstrated a profound dedication to the academic community through extensive service and leadership. He has served on the Steering Committees for top-tier conferences, including IEEE VR, IEEE ISMAR, and IEEE 3DUI. His leadership roles are numerous, having served as General Co-Chair for IEEE VR 2019 in Osaka, which was the largest in-person conference in its history at the time. Additionally, he is on the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) and has frequently been a Board Member of the VRSJ.
Martin Goebel
About the Speaker:
Martin Göbel received the PhD (Dr.-Ing.) in 1990 from Darmstadt University. He is author and editor of several books on Graphics Standards, Visualization and Virtual Reality. He has chaired four Eurographics Workshops on Virtual Environments from 1993 to 1998, has been program co-chair of the EUROGRAPHICS 95 and 98 conference, conference Co-chair of the Virtual Enviromnments'98 conference and has been program committee member of the many Conferences in VR and visualization for several years. Martin Goebel is member of the IEEE Computer Society, the EUROGRAPHICS Association and the German Computer Society (GI).
Christian Sandor
About the Speaker:
Christian Sandor is a Professor at Université Paris-Saclay and the leader of the ARAI team at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Since the year 2000, his foremost research interest is Augmented Reality, as he believes that it will have a profound impact on the future of mankind. In 2005, he obtained a doctorate in Computer Science from the Technische Universität München, Germany under the supervision of Prof. Gudrun Klinker and Prof. Steven Feiner. He decided to explore the research world in the spirit of Alexander von Humboldt and has lived outside of Germany ever since to work with leading research groups at institutions including: The University of Tokyo (Japan), Nara Institute of Science and Technology (Japan), Columbia University (New York, USA), Canon’s Leading-Edge Technology Research Headquarters (Tokyo, Japan), Graz University of Technology (Austria), University of Stuttgart (Germany), University of South Australia, City University of Hong Kong, and Tohoku University (Japan). He currently serves as an editorial board member for Virtual Reality & Intelligent Hardware and as a steering committee member for ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction. He has been program chair for numerous conferences, including IEEE ISMAR, ACM SIGGRAPH Asia XR, and ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Symposium On Mobile Graphics And Interactive Applications.
