2nd International Workshop on XR for Challenging Environments

Topics of Interest

We welcome 2–4 page position papers featuring novel concepts, empirical findings, provocative statements, or case studies addressing topics including:

• The Augmented Professional: Cognitive load, skill evolution, and human agency in mission-critical XR use.
• Human-AI Teaming: Moving beyond AI as a tool toward AI as a team member — shared situational awareness, role negotiation, and real-time coordination in high-stakes XR environments.
• Multi-Agent Coordination: Design challenges for environments where humans, robots, and AI agents share the same operational and information space without stepping on each other.
• Multi-Stakeholder Design: Co-designing XR for challenging environments with operators, managers, regulators, and end-users as active participants rather than informants.
• XR as a Collaboration Medium: Using XR to support shared awareness and communication among distributed or co-located teams in challenging environments.
• Cross-Domain Knowledge Transfer: What emergency medicine can learn from military XR, what industrial operations can borrow from healthcare — and how to make that transfer systematic.
• Design for Operational Deployment: Building XR systems that hold up under field realities: degraded communications, physical stress, time pressure, and environmental uncertainty.
• Transfer of Training: Which skills, habits, and mental models carry over from XR training to live deployment, and which break down under real operational conditions?
• Researcher-Practitioner Partnership: Structures and formats that enable genuine two-way learning between academic researchers and field experts, beyond one-off consultation.
• Cross-Disciplinary Research Integration: How HCI, AI, cognitive science, and domain practice can move from parallel work toward genuinely integrated XR4CE-related research agendas.
• Case Studies: XR-in-use experiences and lessons learned from emergency response, industrial operations, healthcare, and other challenging environments.