Author: Jesús Gutiérrez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain)
The ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (ACM SIGMM), co-sponsored the second edition of the International Summer School on Extended Reality Technology and Experience (XRTX), which was took place from July 8-11, 2024 in Madrid (Spain) hosted by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. As in the first edition in 2023, in the organization also participated Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Nokia, Universidad de Zaragoza and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. It attracted 29 participants from different disciplines (e.g., engineering, computer science, psychology, etc.) and 7 different countries.

The support from ACM SIGMM permitted to bring top researchers in the field of XR to deliver keynotes in different topics related to technological (e.g., volumetric video, XR for healthcare) and user-centric factors (e.g., user experience evaluation, multisensory experiences, etc.), such as Pablo César (CWI, Netherlands), Anthony Steed (UCL, UK), Manuela Chessa (University of Genoa, Italy), Qi Sun (New York University), Diego Gutiérrez (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain), and Marianna Obrist (UCL, UK). Also, an industry session was also included, led by Gloria Touchard (Nokia, Spain).

In addition to these 7 keynotes, the program included a creative design session led by Elena Márquez-Segura (Universidad Carlos III, Spain), a tutorial on Ubiq given by Sebastian Friston (UCL, UK), and 2 practical sessions led by Telmo Zarraonandia (Universidad Carlos III, Spain) and Sandra Malpica (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) to get hands-on experience working with Unity for VR development .

Moreover, there were poster and demo sessions distributed along the whole duration of the school, in which the participants could showcase their works.

The summer school was also sponsored by Nokia and the Computer Science and Engineering Department of Universidad Carlos III, which allowed to offer grants to support a number of students with the registration and traveling costs.
Finally, in addition to science, there was time for fun with social activities, like practicing real and VR archery and visiting and immersive exhibition about Pompeii.


The list of talks was:
- “Towards volumetric video conferencing” by Pablo Cesar.
- “Strategies for Designing and Evaluating eXtended Reality Experiences” by Anthony Steed.
- “XR for healthcare: Immersive and interactive technologies for serious games and exergames”, by Manuela Chessa.
- “Toward Human-Centered XR: Bridging Cognition and Computation”, by Qi Sun.
- “Improving the user’s experience in VR” by Diego Gutiérrez.
- “Why XR is important for Nokia”, Gloria Touchard.
- “The Role of Multisensory Experiences in Extended Reality: Unlocking the Power of Smell” by Marianna Obrist.