VVR lab graduate and undergraduate students won the IEEE Worldhaptics 2025 Best SIC Innovation Challenge Award. Two projects of the lab were selected for the finals through a competitive procedure and were presented live at the conference on July 8-11 in Suwon, S. Korea. The Innovations “Optimizing Take-Over Requests in Autonomous Vehicles through Haptic Feedback” and “Enhancing Emotional Communication in Shared Visuo-Haptic XR Environments through Vibrotactile Actuation” were demonstrated by the PhD students Antonios Belesis, Christoforos Vlachos, Iliana Loi and undergraduate students Georgios Papadimitriou, Michalis Kouvarakis, Panagiotis Kiousis, Anastos Ksanthis and Emmanouil Tsiknakis.

The innovation on “Enhancing Emotional Communication in Shared Visuo-Haptic XR Environments through Vibrotactile Actuation” won the Best SIC innovation Challenge Award for 2025. This project aims to enhance human interaction in shared visuo-haptic XR environments through emotional haptic feedback, addressing current XR limitations: limited non-verbal communication, lack of emotional awareness in virtual interactions, and absence of tactile emotion sharing. The prototype encompasses a two-user interaction scenario in a shared visuo-haptic XR environment, where emotions are captured, analyzed, and rendered via haptics using deep learning-based emotion estimation. Thus, our multimodal framework incorporates: (i) an emotional trigger mechanism through graphic and visual effects, (ii) facial emotion recognition via deep learning, (iii) emotion-to-haptic mapping, (iv) emotion transfer via haptics, and (v) real-time emotional conveyance.