Governance

CO-CREATING THE FUTURE OF XR GOVERNANCE
CONNECTING RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE THROUGH INTERACTIVE DIALOGUE

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Wed November 11, 2026 12:00 pm CET

As Social VR becomes increasingly sophisticated and interconnected, decisions about how virtual spaces are designed and governed increasingly affect fundamental rights, the circulation of information, user safety and the distribution of power between platforms, public authorities and communities.

This session asks a deliberately open question: If immersive environments are becoming shared social spaces, how can the people who research, regulate, build and inhabit them co-create the rules by which those spaces should operate?

Rául Ruiz Rodriguez, Yannick Prié and Tara Collingwoode-Williams, moderated by Marco Gillies, invite the IMMERSIVE X community into an interactive dialogue exploring key issues including freedom of expression and content moderation, jurisdiction and extraterritoriality, inclusion and accessibility.

The session will also introduce VirTUE, a European network aimed at building better, more ethical and inclusive XR worlds. Not simply a panel of presentations, this is an invitation to help shape the conversation about how our shared immersive spaces should be governed.

Format

Talk + Workshop

App

ENGAGE

Location

Karls Virtual Retreat

Duration

45 min

Presenter

Raúl Ruiz Rodríguez

Assistant Professor at University of Alicante

Raúl Ruiz Rodríguez is Assistant Professor of Private International Law at the University of Alicante and Subdirector of the Cátedra MetaversoUA, a research chair funded by Meta Platforms. He holds a PhD from the University of Alicante (cum laude, 2024) and an LLM from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2022). His research focuses on the private international law challenges raised by the metaverse and immersive (XR) environments, alongside related work on trade secret protection, data transfers, and cryptocurrencies. His doctoral thesis won the RADE 2025 Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis, he has held research stays at the Max Planck Institutes in Luxembourg and Hamburg, and at NOVA School of Law.

Yannick Prié

Professor at Nantes University

Yannick Prié is a Full Professor at the University of Nantes, France. His primary research interests span Human-Computer Interaction, User Experience, eXtended Reality and Visual Analytics. A strong advocate for interdisciplinary collaboration, he frequently partners with experts in the humanities, medicine, and cognitive science. He has worked on the intersection of mental health and XR for more than a decade, specifically exploring XR-based evaluation and remediation techniques, with a recent focus on how social XR can be leveraged to design and implement immersive teleclinics. Recent related topics include group navigation in social VR or phenomenological studies of breaks in presence.

Tara Collingwoode-Williams

XR Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London

Dr Tara Collingwoode-Williams is an XR lecturer, researcher, and creative technologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, working at the intersection of immersive technology and human experience. Her PhD investigated the psychological impact of avatar self-representation in immersive virtual environments. She now teaches Virtual Reality development, while continuing her research into how VR and emerging technologies shape embodiment, training, and social interaction. Tara is also Co-Founder of the Black XR Network (BXRN), a community focused on supporting and increasing ethnic diversity across the creative and immersive technology ecosystem.

Moderator

Marco Gillies

Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London

Marco is a Professor of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is Associated Head of the School of Computing for Research and Knowledge Exchange and co-director (with Xueni ‘Sylvia’ Pan) of both the Masters in Virtual and Augmented Reality and the Social, Empathic and Embodied Virtual Reality (SeeVR) Lab. He has been researching Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence since the late 1990s and has particularly worked on virtual humans and movement based interaction with VR.

CO-CREATING THE FUTURE OF XR GOVERNANCECONNECTING RESEARCH, POLICY AND PRACTICE THROUGH INTERACTIVE DIALOGUE