International Workshop on Reality Mediation: Personalized, Shared, and Connected Realities

Abstract

Recent advances in AI, XR, multimodal sensing, wearable interfaces, and cyber-physical infrastructures are expanding the role of Ubiquitous Computing from supporting everyday activities to shaping how people perceive, interpret, and discuss about the world around them. These systems can enable accessibility, learning, mobility, collaboration, and public-space interaction at unprecendented personalization levels, but they may also fragment shared understanding, create asymmetries, and raise concerns around manipulation, privacy, safety, accountability, and trust. This workshop introduces reality mediation as a unifying lens for these emerging challenges. It brings together researchers from across UbiComp’s contributing disciplines, including but not limited to HCI, XR, AI, urban computing, mobility, cyber-physical systems, and trustworthy computing, to discuss how personalized and mediated experiences can remain intelligible, shareable, and societally grounded. The workshop aims to develop concepts, design principles, evaluation methods, and research questions for future ubiquitous computing systems that are not only adaptive and intelligent, but also supportive of shared understanding, towards ubiquitous technology that increases societal cohesion rather than undermining it.