This week, on April 21, 2026, we had the pleasure of hosting Pavel Manakhov, PhD, from the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, for a one-day visit to the Interactive Media Lab Dresden. During his stay, we presented a selection of our current demos and exchanged ideas on current research topics.

As part of his visit, Pavel gave a talk in our Dresden Talks series, titled “Interaction During Walking: Why UI Placement Matters for AR Glasses On the Go.” The talk explored the challenges users face with head-mounted displays and discussed how future augmented reality glasses can offer multiple 3D UI placements based on fixation stability.

We thank Pavel for his visit, the insightful talk, and the inspiring discussions, and we look forward to staying in touch.

This year’s edition of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, widely regarded as the leading venue in Human-Computer Interaction, was held in Barcelona, Spain from April 13 to 17, 2026. Under the theme “Creant el demà junts” (“Creating Tomorrow Together”), the conference brought together researchers, designers, and practitioners from around the world. Six members from the IML team (Raimund Dachselt, Mats Ole Ellenberg, Julian Baader Katja Krug, Susmita Khadse, Weizhou Luo) attended the conference, contributing two full papers, one submission to the Student Mentoring Program, and four workshop submissions.

In addition, Raimund Dachselt served as session chair, Katja Krug participated in the Student Mentoring Program, and Mats Ole Ellenberg helped as a student volunteer and contributed to the success of the conference.

The prestigious CHI had 5254 participants this year onsite in Barcelona. There were 1702 conference full papers accepted (out of 6730 submitted, acceptance rate: 25.3%) and 36 journal papers invited for presentation. CHI thus continues the growth trend of recent years with these record numbers.

Below you will find more information on our team’s contributions to CHI 2026.

Raimund Dachselt and Katja Krug co-organized the workshop “Beyond Fatigue: Building an Ergonomic Future for XR” as part of the first AlpCHI conference, which took place in March 2026 in Ascona, Switzerland. Katja Krug also attended the conference in person.

Under the theme “Interaction in Nature, in the Wild, at the Summit,” this newly established conference brought together Human-Computer Interaction researchers from the Alpine region and beyond, hosted at Monte Verità overlooking Lake Maggiore.

Our workshop focused on emerging ergonomic challenges in Extended Reality (XR), such as the physical and cognitive strain introduced by multimodal interaction, as well as other causes of fatigue. It featured engaging breakout sessions in which current issues were discussed and ideas for more sustainable and comfortable XR interaction were developed. The workshop attracted strong interest and provided a lively platform for exchange and collaboration. We are excited about the many insightful discussions and new impulses, and look forward to future developments in this research area.

This week, we happily welcomed Prof. Eva Hornecker from the Human-Computer Interaction group at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar at the Interactive Media Lab.

As a co-founder of the international Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction conference (TEI) and a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), she brought with her fascinating insights into the field of data physicalisation and ‘beyond the desktop’ interaction with data.

A highlight of the day was her inspiring talk titled “Data Physicalisation and Sensification – How Explorative Research Led to a Design Vocabulary for Physicalisation”, which she had previously presented as a keynote at Eurovis 2025 in Luxembourg.

We sincerely thank Prof. Hornecker for her visit and the insightful exchange, and are excited about the prospect of future collaboration.

The 18th annual ACM SIGGRAPH conference on Motion, Interaction and Games (MIG 2025) took place at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, from December 3rd to 5th. Julián Méndez attended the event to present our invited article on “Immersive Data-Driven Storytelling: Scoping an Emerging Field Through the Lenses of Research, Journalism, and Games”.

The MIG 2025 conference program consisted of 15 long and 4 short papers (out of 46 total submissions), 11 posters, and 3 invited papers from journals: 2 from the Computers & Graphics and 1 from Transactions on Computer Graphics & Visualization (TVCG). The program also incorporated several keynotes by influential researchers and industry partners. The single-track conference highlighted advances in mixed reality, avatar representations, rendering, animation, and games at its forefront. As such, our invited TVCG article received a warm welcome from the community and the “Best Student Presentation” award. Topped off with a variety of social events at the heart of Zurich, the event was a wonderful and meaningful time for our representative.

This year’s IEEE VIS was held in Vienna, Austria, from November 2nd to 7th. Our Interactive Media Lab Dresden contributed two TVCG journal articles and a poster. Raimund Dachselt and Julián Méndez traveled to present the TVCG articles on augmented dynamic data physicalization and immersive data-driven storytelling.

The premier forum for advances in visualization and visual analytics hosted 1114 participants this year, with 80 accepted papers out of 234 submissions (acceptance rate: 34%). The conference, consisting of full and short paper presentation sessions, workshops, tutorials, award ceremonies for technical and test-of-time achievements, was a fascinating and inspiring experience for our representatives. Below, is more information about our contributions for this year.

Our work on The Concrete Evonne was presented at the 15th International Symposium on Frontiers of Combining Systems (FroCoS 2025) and at the 38th International Workshop on Description Logics (DL 2025) in Iceland and Poland, respectively. This work is a result of our collaboration within the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 248 (CPEC).

Evonne is a web-based visualization tool for explaining reasoning and debugging ontologies. In its latest version, the Concrete Evonne includes capabilities to explain combined logics and concrete domains of linear equations and difference constraints through tailored visualizations and proofs. The main authors of this work are Christian Alrabbaa from Prof. Dr.-Ing. Franz Baader‘s Chair of Automata Theory and Julián Méndez from our Interactive Media Lab Dresden. As such, they traveled to FroCoS and DL to present and discuss their work.

On September 3rd to 6th, the DL workshop took place at the University of Opole, in Poland, and saw many exciting works while also serving as a celebration to Prof. Baader’s career, achievements, and shaping influence within the DL community. In this event, The Concrete Evonne was presented as an extended abstract on the poster sessions.

Then, from September 29th to October 1st, FroCoS took place at the Reykjavík University, in Iceland, co-located with other conferences and workshops on automated reasoning and theorem proving (TABLEAUX, ITP). With its emphasis on system combinations, FroCoS served as the perfect venue for presenting The Concrete Evonne as a full paper on explanations of combined description logics and concrete domains.

In October, our DFG project “tVISt: Data Visualization Beyond Planar Displays” commenced in collaboration with our French project partners, Anastasia Bezerianos from Université Paris-Saclay, as well as Tobias Isenberg and Petra Isenberg from the Inria Team Aviz.

The project investigates how data visualizations can be presented and utilized beyond traditional flat displays, such as on curved, spherical, or flexible surfaces. The goal is to develop new approaches that adapt visualizations and interactions to the specific characteristics of such displays and fully exploit their potential.

Under the leadership of Raimund Dachselt, the German coordinator of the project, our Lab is starting the collaboration. Our staff member, Julian Baader, is part of the project on the German side, while on the French side, two additional PhD students are involved.

Recently, Julian Baader and Katja Krug attended the Mensch und Computer conference in Chemnitz. Both contributed a short paper and presented an associated poster.

Julian Baader presented the poster for “The Invisible Hand of the Context: Authoring of Context-Aware Mixed Reality Labels”, a joint work with Mats Ellenberg and Marc Satkowski.

Katja Krug presented the poster for “Face Off: External Tracking vs. Manual Control for Facial Expressions in Multi-User Extended Reality”, in collaboration with Xiaoli Song and Wolfgang Büschel.

This year’s Mensch und Computer marked its 25th anniversary and was celebrated at TU Chemnitz with around 600 attendees. Julian and Katja had a great time, received valuable feedback, and are looking forward to coming back soon.

Over the last two weeks, we were delighted to welcome another distinguished guest to the Interactive Media Lab Dresden: Prof. Can Liu, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at the City University of Hong Kong.

During her two-week stay, we had the opportunity to present a selection of our current demos and engage in intensive discussions about our research and the similarities of both of our labs. We also actively collaborated on a project that we plan to submit to the upcoming CHI conference.

A highlight of her visit was her talk on “AI-powered Semantic and Multimodal Interfaces”, in which she shared fascinating insights into her current research directions.

We sincerely thank Prof. Liu for her inspiring visit and look forward to continuing our collaboration.