Extended reality (XR) technologies are transforming domains like gaming, healthcare, and training, offering benefits such as enhanced safety, cost reduction, and immersive experiences. However, current XR systems often overlook accessibility for individuals with diverse abilities and remain unexplored in inclusive learning contexts. The Incluverso-5G project seeks to address this gap by leveraging XR to improve the lives of individuals with intellectual disabilities, including employment inclusion. This paper presents an immersive tool to support remote training for certified cooking courses, enabling users unable to attend in-person classes to access training and certification.The system includes an advanced 360-degree content viewer and a real-time immersive supervision tool, utilizing features like six degrees of freedom (6-DoF), color passthrough, and hand tracking for interactive learning. A four-step remote learning process—sensitization, instructional content, supervised practice, and certification—ensures accessibility and usability. The tool empowers individuals to acquire valuable skills and achieve professional certifications, demonstrating the potential of XR for inclusive training.

Cognitive training is a common therapeutic approach to improve the quality of life of individuals with intellectual disabilities, although conventional methods often show limited engagement and skill transfer. The use of eXtended Reality (XR) allows to develop immersive cognitive training, with evidence of improved motivation and engagement. In parallel, biosignals and behavioral metrics are increasingly used to assess user experience and cognitive state in immersive environments. This study presents a longitudinal evaluation of an immersive cognitive training application involving eight participants over eight months. Multiple data sources were collected, including eye tracking, electromyography and electrodermal activity, together with questionnaires and interviews to capture subjective experience. Preliminary results focus on gaze and interaction data. The number of fixations reflects task complexity, with more complex scenarios associated with increased exploratory behavior and a higher proportion of fixations on distracting elements. Interaction data from the most complex task indicate improved efficiency over time both before and during actions. Further analysis will explore these findings and incorporate the remaining physiological and behavioral data, together with the analysis of the interviews and questionnaires.

Embodied design can be an effective approach for developing extended reality (XR) experiences by enabling design teams to ideate and prototype through hands-on physical interaction. This body-centric approach is particularly valuable for addressing the complexities and paradigm shifts inherent in XR systems, where users engage significantly with their bodies in virtual environments, i.e. through head movements, body orientation, and hand tracking among others. In this paper, we present an embodied design method, which we used to design an XR-based cooking learning tool aimed at fostering autonomous learning for individuals with intellectual disabilities. The learning tool features 360-degree video recipes with a configurable combination of immersive video and passthrough views to adapt to different user needs and contexts. Our method includes functional prototypes to iterate current design concepts and explore usability across different possible interaction modalities. These tools were used to implement the Wizard of Oz technique and simulate different interaction techniques-such as voice commands and simple button-based inputs. To assess the usability of these tools, we employed the subjective Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment. The inclusion of this form of evaluation directly within the embodied design process is a novel contribution, providing valuable information about the usability of the prototypes as embodied design tools. Finally, we present preliminary results of the workshop, which illustrate the usefulness of embodied design for the development of XR interactive experiences.

In this demo, we showcase a system that applies extended reality (XR) and volumetric video to enhance cultural experiences. The platform enables real-time interaction between users and a presenter within a virtual environment enriched with 3D assets. Users can visualize a volumetric representation of the presenter captured in real-time using a Free Viewpoint Video (FVV) system. Additionally, the presenter can control the elements in the scene using hand gestures, recognized by an artificial intelligence (AI) model. We propose a methodology to assess the subjective quality of this experience through user studies. The complete system will be demonstrated, including the real-time volumetric capture and the immersive application to participate in the cultural experience.

Figure 1: Three different hand representations based on different pass through techniques while users are performing three different tasks.

The increasing deployment of immersive technologies is opening up opportunities in the field of behavioral therapies.In particular, the use of eXtended Reality technologies allows the development of therapies that require bringing users to a remote location without

The combination of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies with physiological signals offers innovative approaches to cognitive training for individuals with intellectual disabilities.This study presents a tool designed for cognitive training aimed at job integration through interactive and immersive environments.The tool was developed in collaboration with therapists from the Juan XXIII Foundation, an occupational center, and focuses on enhancing cognitive skills through serious games for job training.These games simulate realistic environments, such as a cafeteria and a supermarket, where users must complete various tasks.These tasks are designed to progressively increase in complexity as users advance, allowing them to improve their skills.Therapists can monitor and control the training sessions in real-time through an application, while users engage with the immersive scenarios.Additionally, the system incorporates non-invasive biosensors to track physiological data, such as heart rate, eye movement, etc. providing valuable insights into the

This study investigates the use of an innovative educational tool, a video coding app, to improve students’ understanding of video coding concepts. The app was implemented in a university-level computer science course, and data were collected on students’ perceptions of the tool and their performance on knowledge tests. In this study, 7 participants conducted two practical sessions using the app. In each session, they performed a pre- and post-test evaluation. After each session, they also completed two subjective questionnaires to measure the perception of learning and usability of the tool. Results showed that the app was perceived as engaging and easy to use by students. However, analysis of test performance did not show a significant impact on learning outcomes. This suggests that the quality of experience may not always be correlated with objective results when evaluating new learning tools. As a lesson learned, we always recommend using pilot studies when evaluating the performance of new teaching tools. In addition, such studies should subjectively and objectively measure the influence of the tool on student performance.

In this work, we propose a demo of an immersive videoconference system using Free Viewpoint Video (FVV) technology. It makes use of the FVV Live system, which covers the entire FVV pipeline (capture, view rendering, and visualization) while working in real-time. The FVV Live system consists of nine cameras that capture an environment and a view renderer that uses the information from the cameras to generate a synthetic view at an arbitrary point.It is designed as a hybrid demo. While the capture and rendering processes take place at our premises, FVV Live can be visualized through devices connected to the Internet.The system allows immersive navigation of a virtual scene with 6 degrees of freedom, and interaction with live-captured avatars integrated in such scene. For this purpose, it uses WebRTC connections to update the position of the virtual camera and to receive the FVV Live view encoded as a video.Additionally, the user will be recorded by a simple camera and microphone setup, and the generated streams will be transmitted to our premises through the same WebRTC server. This way, people being recorded by FVV Live will be able to see and hear the user, enabling bidirectional communication.

Immersive technologies like eXtended Reality (XR) are the next step in videoconferencing. In this context, understanding the effect of delay on communication is crucial. This article presents the first study on the impact of delay on collaborative tasks using a realistic Social XR system. Specifically, we design an experiment and evaluate the impact of end-to-end delays of 300, 600, 900, 1,200, and 1,500 ms on the execution of a standardized task involving the collaboration of two remote users that meet in a virtual space and construct block-based shapes. To measure the impact of the delay in this communication scenario, objective and subjective data were collected. As objective data, we measured the time required to execute the tasks and computed conversational characteristics by analyzing the recorded audio signals. As subjective data, a questionnaire was prepared and completed by every user to evaluate different factors such as overall quality, perception of delay, annoyance using the system, level of presence, cybersickness, and other subjective factors associated with social interaction. The results show a clear influence of the delay on the perceived quality and a significant negative effect as the delay increases. Specifically, the results indicate that the acceptable threshold for end-to-end delay should not exceed 900 ms. This article additionally provides guidelines for developing standardized XR tasks for assessing interaction in Social XR environments.

The rise of eXtended Reality (XR) has led to multiple ways of including the user’s body in interactive experiences. However, the delay limits of self-view rendering in interactive XR remain unexplored. This article presents a minimum self-view latency system and an interactive task-based experiment to study the influence of different levels of self-view delay on Quality of Experience (QoE) and task performance. During the experiment, 23 users tested 8 delay conditions (from 190 to 597 ms) while building block-based models. The results show a hard threshold in terms of involvement and overall quality around 450ms. However, the impact on adaptation and execution time was less pronounced. This indicates that although users adapted to the task in a certain way, their immersion was severely affected above a certain self-view delay value.

Recently an impressive development in immersive technologies, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and 360${^\circ }$video, has been witnessed. However, methods for quality assessment have not been keeping up. This paper studies quality assessment of 360${^\circ }$video from the cross-lab tests (involving ten laboratories and more than 300 participants) carried out by the Immersive Media Group (IMG) of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG). These tests were addressed to assess and validate subjective evaluation methodologies for 360${^\circ }$video. Audiovisual quality, simulator sickness symptoms, and exploration behavior were evaluated with short (from 10 seconds to 30 seconds) 360${^\circ }$sequences. The following factors’ influences were also analyzed: assessment methodology, sequence duration, Head-Mounted Display (HMD) device, uniform and non-uniform coding degradations, and simulator sickness assessment methods. The obtained results have demonstrated the validity of Absolute Category Rating (ACR) and Degradation Category Rating (DCR) for subjective tests with 360${^\circ }$videos, the possibility of using 10-second videos (with or without audio) when addressing quality evaluation of coding artifacts, as well as any commercial HMD (satisfying minimum requirements). Also, more efficient methods than the long Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) have been proposed to evaluate related symptoms with 360${^\circ }$videos. These results have been instrumental for the development of the ITU-T Recommendation P.919. Finally, the annotated dataset from the tests is made publicly available for the research community.

Current extended reality applications use omnidirectional video to boost users' immersion and sense of presence. As contents from distant video sources cannot be instantaneously delivered, the end-to-end delay becomes a key problem when user actions cannot be simultaneously matched by system reactions. Thus, we have designed and executed an experiment to assess its influence on the quality of experience, the sense of presence, and the sickness caused. To do it, we have developed a viewport adaptive simulator to render simultaneously two layers of immersive video to allow different adaptation schemes and delay values. Twenty observers have assessed 180 test videos from 9 sources. Our analysis shows a clear influence of the delay condition and the adaptation scheme on the perceived quality. Moreover, it also shows that the adaptation schemes and delay conditions have a small influence on the sense of presence and little effect on observers sickness.