Here you can find all the activities related to The European Metaverse Research Network.
This is our 3rd international conference, and this one is in conjunction with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France.
We are happy to announce that the 4th edition of the Spring School on Social XR, will take place at CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) in Amsterdam from April 20-23 2026.
Further information:
https://www.dis.cwi.nl/spring-school/
The 2025 EMRN Conference a Metaverse for the Good will take place at the University of Alicante, Spain. The theme is ‘AI and the Metaverse’.
The 3rd edition of the Spring School on Social XR will take place from April 7th to 10th 2025 at CWI in Amsterdam. The future of media communication is immersive. Thanks to its interactivity, enhanced realism and personalized viewing paradigm, Extended Reality (XR) is a key technology to empower sectors such as cultural heritage, education, manufacturing, and to provide a climate-neutral alternative to traveling in the European Green Deal. Social XR systems promise to overcome the limitations of current real-time teleconferencing systems, enabling a better sense of immersion, increasing the sense of presence and fostering more natural interpersonal interactions.
This was a tutorial presented at IEEE Virtual Reality 2025 in St Malo, France.
The Academic Chair for the Responsible Development of the Metaverse of the University of Alicante (Spain) is hosting its I International Congress “Towards a Responsible Development of the Metaverse” on 13-14 June 2024 at the University of Alicante.
The purpose of the Congress is to gather international experts from different disciplines to discuss recurrent issues directly related to the development of the Metaverse ranging from intellectual property, personal data protection, contract law, content moderation or cybersecurity. We want to assess whether the existing legal framework provides adequate protection to all citizens as well as legal certainty to entrepreneurs in the Metaverse so as to allow optimum use of the potential offered by this new virtual environment.
This conference will be held at the CCCB in Barcelona. It covers a number of themes ranging from technical implementation through to legal and ethical issues. It is aimed at policy makers and industry, as well as researchers in the field.
Further information and registration including the call for papers.
This course is organised by Prof. Aurelio Lopez-Tarruella, director of the Chair of the responsible development of the Metaverse of the University of Alicante (Spain). The course will be mainly in Spanish. The concept of the Metaverse will be introduced by the EMRN Coordinator Mel Slater.
Further details and registration (French)
At 10:00 Mel Slater will speak about metaverse developments and applications.
Vagelis PAPAKONSTANTINOU (Professor at VUB, Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Pablo TRIGO KRAMCSÁC (Doctoral Researcher at VUB) will present the preliminary conclusions of a paper they are writing on the topic. Specifically, the document explores critical personal data protection issues arising in the dynamic, immersive, interactive and ever-expanding context of metaverse digital landscapes. The technology underpinning these virtual environments enables the collection, storing and interconnection of large-scale datasets, which, of course, include personal information. This raises concerns about the ability of the current data protection regulatory framework to handle such intricate processing activities. Among various considerations, it is crucial to inquire about the status of core principles such as lawfulness, purpose limitation, data minimisation, and accountability, and about the integration of data protection by design and by default within these multifaceted virtual frameworks.
The European Metaverse Research Network has organized a session at this year’s Stereopsia conference in Brussels. Join us to learn more about the research projects and to meet the EMNR members. The talks will be followed by a reception and demonstrations.
A legal introduction to the regulation of the Metaverse will be presented by Professor Dr.Matthias C. Kettemann (Institute for Theory and Future of Law, University of Innsbruck) will be hosting an event on October 12th, 2023 starting at 10 am. The event will be conducted in English.
Mel Slater will speak at the 2023 Web 3D conference in San Sebastián, Spain.
One of the most powerful uses of virtual reality is its support for remotely located people to meet together. Meeting in VR where each person is represented by a virtual body, which naturally exhibits body gestures, head turns, eye movements and facial expressions, where all the participants are in the same virtual space, is a very different experience from teleconferencing. People can maintain eye contact, gesture towards each other, change their physical proxemics relationships, take a walk together, almost as in reality. This talk will go over some of the history of shared VR, and also discuss developments that include meeting yourself, and interacting with celebrities. I will discuss the GuestXR project that combines virtual meetings with Machine Learning in order to address problems that may occur in virtual meetings, and ideas around the development of a Metaverse.
The relationship between racism, representation, and discrimination in the discourse around artificial intelligence and its relevance for immersive virtual environments will be the topic of study by Dr. Deborah Schnabel (Director of the Anne Frank Educational Institution Frankfurt) at the symposium on September 28, 2023, starting at 10 am. The event will be held in English.
The presentation will explore potential ways in which Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) in the Metaverse might be exploited by extremist and anti-democratic actors. DAOs are digital entities that are collaboratively governed without central leadership and operate based on blockchain. As such, DAOs allow internet users to establish their own organisational structures, which no longer require the involvement of a third party in financial transactions and rulemaking. The World Economic Forum described DAOs as “an experiment to reimagine how we connect, collaborate and create”. However, they might also give rise to new threats emerging from decentralised extremist mobilisation, such as the planning of attacks or coordinated hate speech campaigns. They could pose a risk to minority rights, challenge the rule of law, facilitate election interference campaigns, and disrupt institutions that are currently considered fundamental pillars of democratic systems.
The event will be held in English.
In the Shoes of Others: How can Virtual Reality be used to improve police training in dealing with hate crime? On August 22, the British production company Mountain Mother Productions will present a tool used by Greater Manchester Police to train its officers at the College of Police Academy in Hamburg. The experience can be tried out on-site and discussed with experts and practitioners. The Immersive Democracy project’s symposium is organized in cooperation with Professors Dr. Eva Groß and Dr. Ulrike Zähringer from the Hamburg Police Academy. The event will be held in English and in-person, but those interested can also join digitally.
The School of Management of Politecnico di Milano chairs the Metaverse Marketing Lab and the Physiology, Emotions and Experience Lab, two research labs studying immersive experiences both user side and supply side. The goal of the Lab is to understand how companies are undertaking seminal metaverse marketing initiatives and the behavior of the users when exposed to them.
We invite you to the online lecture by Dennish Shah, Ph.D. He is the Barbara and Elmer Sunday Professor and Associate Professor of Marketing, Founding Director of the Social Media Intelligence Lab, and Executive Director of the Marketing RoundTable at Georgia State University. His research has been published in top journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Harvard Business Review, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Sloan Management Review , and several other outlets. His recent (2023) paper “Marketing in the Metaverse: Conceptual understanding, framework, and research agenda”, written with Kevin G. Barrera and published on the Journal of Business Research is considered one of the most influential marketing paper published so far on metaverse marketing.
Monday, 3 July 2023, at 16:30 (CET), the Chair for the responsible development of the Metaverse and the Cátedra Fundación Integra sobre Identidad y Derechos Digitales will hold the webinar “Decentralised Digital Identity in the Metaverse under eIDAS 2”. This is the second of the two activities the Chair dedicates to this topic.
A presentation by the Immersive Democracy Project.
The 8th International XR Metaverse Conference was held on June 28-30 at the University of Las Vegas. Experts from academia and industry discussed the opportunities and challenges of immersive technologies from different disciplinary perspectives. The Immersive Democracy project of the European Metaverse Research Network presented their research results and networked with the international community….
Avatars form an essential building block of the Metaverse. When users enter the Metaverse, they usually need a digital representation to act in the virtual environment. Avatars satisfy that need and allow users to express themselves, to communicate and interact with others. In virtual game worlds such as Second Life or World or Warcraft– usually depicted as the first steps towards the emerging Metaverse – typical players devote hundreds of hours and a substantial amount of money to develop their avatar. Yet, how does the law protect the digital identities of avatars? What happens if an avatar gets insulted, harassed or copied by other users (or their avatars)? What happens if the Metaverse platform provider restricts or even completely blocks the avatar’s means to communicate and operate in the online world?
Martin EBERS (President of the Robotics & AI Law Society (RAILS) and Professor of IT Law, University of Tartu) will present the preliminary conclusions of a paper he is writing on the topic.
He will receive comments from discussants Cristina PONCIBÒ (Professor of Comparative Private Law, University of Turin), Julija KALPOKIENÉ (Practising Lawyer, Junior Researcher at Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania) and Paul DE HERT (Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussels)
The webinar will be moderated by Paul POLANSKI (Professor at Kozminski University, Warsaw)
Prof. Paweł Śniatała will moderate a panel on Cybersecurity, and Prof. Mariusz Głąbowski will participate in the workshop.
Organised by the Chair for the responsible development of the Metaverse. Taking into consideration the recent Commission’s Call for evidence related with the non-legislative initiative on virtual worlds (metaverses), the Chair has invited Teresa RODRÍGUEZ DE LAS HERAS (Associate Professor of Commercial Law, University Carlos III) and Aurelio LÓPEZ-TARRUELLA(Associate Professor of Private international law, University of Alicante) to debate on the topic.
They will receive comments for discussants Christiana MARKOU (Associate Professor, European University Cyprus), and Jan KRÄMER (Chaired Professor of Information Systems, University of Passau).
The webinar will be moderated by Manuel DESANTES (Professor of Private international law, University of Alicante).
The event will explore the impact of bias and hate speech in extended reality (XR) platforms and discuss ways of prevention.
The speakers will be:
Dr. Sylvie Dijkstra-Soudarissanane and Dr Omar Niamut, TNO The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, The Netherlands.
Title: Social XR and the future of work
Abstract: Through shared and social XR-enabled applications, we can become more productive online, feel more connected to family and friends, and be more effective in our communication and collaboration with colleagues, partners and customers. We can provision virtual and hybrid business meetings, enable virtual visits of doctors to the elderly in nursing homes, support remote education of a new generation and facilitate faster skill transfer from our dwindling community of seasoned experts. In this talk, we present our research efforts on social XR and our plans to validate the promise of the metaverse for the future of work.
Renaissance Numérique launched a series of dialogues about the Metaverse in December 2022. There have been three dialogues:
