Wolfgang Broll Re-elected as Vice-Chair of the GI VR/AR Special Interest Group

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Broll, Head of the Virtual Worlds and Digital Games group, has been re-elected as Vice-Chair of the GI Virtual & Augmented Reality (VR/AR) Special Interest Group. Together with Prof. Dr. Frank Steinicke from the University of Hamburg, he now forms the new leadership team of the Special Interest Group.

For Wolfgang Broll, this marks a return to this role: he previously served as Vice-Chair of the Special Interest Group from 2020 to 2023, before assuming the role of Chair in 2023.

The election also signifies continuity during a phase of significant substantive and structural developments within the Special Interest Group. Since 2024, the GI VR/AR Special Interest Group has no longer been anchored solely in the Graphic Data Processing Division; due to its thematic breadth, it also belongs to the Human-Computer Interaction Division.

Another defining development of recent years is that the topic submitted by the Special Interest Group “World Wide Metaverse. Open. Free. Secure.” was selected by the German Informatics Society (GI) as one of the five Grand Challenges 2025. In doing so, the specialist group has visibly brought a forward-looking topic in immersive technologies into the strategic debates of computer science.

For many years, the GI VR/AR Special Interest Group has served as a key network for the exchange of ideas on immersive technologies in German-speaking countries. It connects research, development, and industry and, among other things, organizes the annual GI VR/AR Workshop, which will be held for the first time at TU Ilmenau in 2027.