The recent adoption of the Metaverse in various sectors indicates its potential for digital transformation. Technologies like XR, where X = Augmented/ Virtual/ Mixed Reality, will be its key enablers and can be powerful tools for developing nations’ digital educational transformation. These developing nations are often categorized under the Global South. This workshop presents a first step toward the socio-technical Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aspects of the Metaverse to understand its impact on education in the Global South. The socio-technical approach helps cover human, social, and organizational factors, leading to more acceptable systems for end users and stakeholders. With the Metaverse, students and teachers can log in via different immersive devices and experience different virtual environments fabricated to their needs, learning, and teaching styles. It will open up possibilities to explore new situations and access facilities that might be impossible due to physical world constraints. Key concepts covered are – (i) A socio-technical HCI approach to the Metaverse, (ii) an Interaction Design perspective on Avatar representation, and (iii) Understanding human work interaction design in the Metaverse.

This workshop will initiate dialogs on (i) The socio-technical issues of the Metaverse for education in the global south and (ii) HCI considerations for educational Metaverse human-work interaction design.

We envision a set of heuristics and guidelines resulting from this workshop that may be useful to Designers, Policy Makers, Researchers, Practitioners, etc. in developing the educational metaverse.

We invite submissions from interested participants in the following areas:

• Socio-technical HCI Design for Metaverse
• Interaction Design
• Challenges for the Metaverse in the Global South
• Cross-cultural Usability and Social Concerns in the Metaverse
• Avatar Representation
• AI and Generative AI for the Metaverse
• Organizational Challenges for the Metaverse 
• Metaverse - Design for/by the Global South
• Educational Aspects of the Metaverse

Submission Guidelines

We plan to produce a Post-Proceedings Volume based on the INTERACT 2023 workshops as a Springer LNCS Series. Only those participants who have registered for the workshop are requested to submit the papers.

We will not be considering submissions from non-registered participants.

The workshop papers and chapter introductions should be formatted using the Springer LNCS format. Authors should consult the Springer Authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, to prepare their papers. Springer proceedings LaTeX templates are also available in Overleaf.

Page lengths: If the submission is considered a full paper, the maximum length is 18 pages + 4 for references; for other submission types (short papers, position papers, posters) the maximum length is 8 pages + 2 for references. 

Authors must submit 1 zip file containing:

• A signed copyright agreement
• Source file in LaTeX or Word format
• PDF of the submission

All individual paper submissions must be as single zip files and include the following:

• Copyright declaration
• Source code as LaTeX or Word format
• PDF of the final version

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to [anmol@iiitd.ac.in]