Author | Lightnews

Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Aug 5

With that in mind we envision Reality Proxy. Check out the video teaser of a world interactable via proxies: youtu.be/F2ul_68PrD0, and stay tuned for more at ACM UIST Conference 2025 in Busan, Korea

Paper: lnkd.in/dFXdc2Bw

Reality Proxy: Fluid Interactions with Real-World Objects in MR via Abstract Representations

YouTube video by Blended Intelligence Research & Devices

youtu.be

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Aug 5

Over the last two years we have seen an acceleration on AI, but if AI is going to enable humans in their day to day tasks, it most probably will be via XR. The issue then is if a selection has real-world consequences, we will need great precision to interact.

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Reposted by Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco

John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · May 3

At least they’re being honest, right?

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Apr 28

This precisely was something we tried to address and quantify in the VALID avatars. We found that ingroup participants were much better at determining the ethnicity of the avatars. And outgroups just had low accuracy labeling MENA, AIAN, NHPI and Hispanics. github.com/xrtlab/Valid...

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Apr 21

It lights my day whenever I see new research enabled by the easiness of use of the @msftresearch.bsky.social #RocketboxAvatars

The XR Research Digest @xrdigest.bsky.social · Apr 21

Using VR to assess executive functions: New research established normative data for the Nesplora Ice Cream test (n=419), identifying three factors—planning, learning and flexibility—with age-related patterns but no gender differences.

doi.org/10.3389/fpsy...

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Apr 18

To me experiments (on an homogeneous population) with 40+ participants are suspicious. Maybe they didn’t find significance with less but just trends so they added people until it was significant.

Sometimes a larger sample means higher probability of significance. murphyresearch.com/sample-size-...

Sample Size: Is Bigger Always Better?

By now, many of us have seen the recent AT&T commercials featuring a man dressed in a suit asking a group of adorable small children seated around a table "Which is better…bigger or smaller?"

murphyresearch.com

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Reposted by Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco

Kasper Hornbæk @khornbaek.bsky.social · Apr 13

Come work with Teresa Hirzle and me in a fully-funded PhD fellowship on extended reality and behavior change. The full add is at employment.ku.dk/phd/?show=16..., the application deadline is May 12th, and we will both be at #chi2025 to discuss. If you are not, feel free to reach out in other ways.

PhD fellowship in extended Reality for Behaviour Change at The Pioneer Centre for AI

employment.ku.dk

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Reposted by Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco

Metaverse @metaverse.metaver.se · Apr 8

»Researchers Catalog 170+ Text Input Techniques to Improve Typing in XR« https://www.roadtovr... #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #XR #VR #MR #AR #BeyondPictures

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Apr 9

Very cool to have the work on XR Text Input reach broader in Road2VR www.roadtovr.com/xr-text-trov...

Thanks @ben.roadtovr.com for inviting Max for a piece. Making VR research a general public interest.

Researchers Catalog 170+ Text Input Techniques to Improve Typing in XR

Efficient text entry without an actual keyboard remains an industry-wide challenge for unlocking productivity use-cases in XR headsets. Researchers have created a comprehensive catalog of existing tex...

www.roadtovr.com

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Reposted by Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco

Android @android.activitypub.awakari.com.ap.brid.gy · Apr 8

Researchers Catalog 170+ Text Input Techniques to Improve Typing in XR Efficient text entry witho...

https://www.roadtovr.com/xr-text-trove-vr-ar-text-input-typing-technique-catalog-max-di-luca/

#Guest #Articles #News #XR #Industry #News

Event Attributes

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Apr 5

Just ported all my Twitter/X posts to BlueSky with @en.blueark.app for $6.
It’s a small action, @bsky.app is open for everybody to train their AIs. Now everyone can use the historic of my human created content. And not only xAI. Data dignity they say…

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Reposted by Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco

Michael Wiesing @vrneuroscience.bsky.social · Mar 31

We have a new position for someone with a strong computer science VR background to work on the PRESENCE project. This would be at the Event Lab, Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona.

If you are interested, you must apply through this website:
lnkd.in/d6QYQKYA
#VRcademicSky

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Reposted by Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco

The XR Research Digest @xrdigest.bsky.social · Mar 26

Can AR-guided tunnels improve motor precision? New research tested HoloLens 2 hand-tracking with 3D holographic trajectories, showing improved performance and positive clinician acceptance.

doi.org/10.1007/s100...

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Reposted by Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco

Petra Isenberg @drpi.bsky.social · Mar 25

Interested in a Visualization/HCI PhD in France? Come join us. We have 2 positions and will accept dual-career couples as well: www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/41...
jobs.inria.fr/public/class...

Inria hiring PhD position in Visualization and HCI in Gif-sur-Yvette, Île-de-France, France | LinkedIn

Posted 5:08:26 PM. 📢 We are recruiting two PhD candidates to work on data visualization for non-planar displays at…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

www.linkedin.com

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 25

You can check out the work next month at @iclr-conf.bsky.social Bi-Align (bialign-workshop.github.io) and FM-wild (fm-wild-community.github.io) workshops:
“PARSE-Ego4D: Personal Action Recommendation Suggestions for Egocentric Videos”

Or start playing right now :)

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 25

But how do we know if our data is any good? We asked 35k humans in Prolific about how correct and useful they found the suggested actions in reference to every video. Now we opensource the new dataset alongside the human ranks. github.com/google/parse... and all the data generation prompts.

GitHub - google/parse-ego4d: Dataset and code for generating 18,000 action suggestions via LLM querries for EGO4D dataset validated by 36,171 human annotations.

Dataset and code for generating 18,000 action suggestions via LLM querries for EGO4D dataset validated by 36,171 human annotations. - google/parse-ego4d

github.com

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 25

But really as it happens with all datasets, the key is on “How to make data useful?” That was our goal with PARSE-Ego4D parse-ego4d.github.io we augment the existing narrations and videos by providing 18k suggested actions using the latest of VLMs. This can be useful to train a future AI agents.

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 25

Ego4D is an incredible anthropological dataset. With over 3600 hours of videos (5 months of human activities) in first person view with written narrations from all over the world ego4d-data.org/fig1.html. (Always reminds me of this movie by #IsabelCoixet youtu.be/bYI3A6WLMBU)

Spain in a day - Tráiler

YouTube video by GRUP MEDIAPRO

youtu.be

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 23

But also: Not all avatars are created equal ⚠️. We did a deep study on preferences (presented at ISMAR 2023 arxiv.org/pdf/2304.01405) and realism matters quite a lot for work scenarios. most people don’t find acceptable a cartoon avatar…

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 23

I love how well the work on bringing avatars to video conferences as an alternative to camera on/off is aging.

Check out our work on avatars via virtual cameras on regular conferences on our paper AllTogether. www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 21

From the knowledge acquired during the pandemic. We can all agree that a policy of letting the virus roam through the flocks will 1) limit containing the spread and 2) increase mutations… and that can end badly. For birds and humans. But hey, I am not the secretary of health. So what do I know?

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 16

Me 2

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 14

@ben.roadtovr.com I know you liked LocomotionVault.github.io so you will probably like this one too

Done

LocomotionVault.github.io

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Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco @twimar.bsky.social · Mar 14

Welcome to the family of significant VR researchers @pedrolopes.org!! I hear the banquet this year was splendid :)

Pedro Lopes @pedrolopes.org · Mar 14

Thanks IEEE VGTC and IEEE VR for this kind
"IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Significant New Researcher" award.
Thanks #IEEEVR2025 for an incredible banquet where I got to chance to say a few words and thank everyone for this (my slides for the banquet speech: lab.plopes.org/published/20...) 1/5

Pedro receiving the award from former awardee Prof. Ana Serrano!

Pedro giving a short speech at the IEEE VR banquet

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Reposted by Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco

Altmetric's Ghost Donut @altmetric.com · Mar 13

Mike spotted this before the rest of us. 🫡

Publications from 2025 are shared more on Bluesky than on X/Twitter.

herrison2000.bsky.social @herrison2000.bsky.social · Mar 13

About to talk to medical affairs colleagues, with the news that Bluesky is carrying more posts about new journal publications than X #bluesky #altmetrics #x #xparrot

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