The Third International Workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality Software Engineering
Seoul, South Korea
held in conjunction with the 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
(ASE 2025), November 16-November 20, 2025
Introduction
News: The program is ready now.
News: We are honored to announce that Prof. Frank Klassner from Villanova University and Prof. Jinqiu Yang from Concordia University will give keynote presentations in our workshop!!!
This workshop aims to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing in the areas of virtual and augmented reality and software engineering, as well as to nurture a research community. VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) are emerging techniques with promising applications. Major IT companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple all have essential investment in the area, and Facebook even have changed its name to Meta to focus on metaverse, a concept technically largely depends on virtual reality. As VR/AR platforms such as Unity, Google ARCore, Apple ARKit, and Meta for Developers are getting more and more popular, thousands of apps have been developed to explore various VR/AR applications such as gaming, education, remote communication, computer-aided operation, etc. VR/AR software development has a lot of special concerns, such as graphics design and performance optimization, management of 3D assets, testing constraints in physical world (for AR apps), and additional privacy protection (e.g., tackling leak of head and body movement information from VR/AR devices). Meanwhile, VR/AR can be adopted as an important technique to support software engineering practices that are not possible in traditional 2D interfaces. For example, 3D visualization of code and project work space may largely enhance software productivity.
In this workshop, we call for talks and papers from both industry and academia to mutually advance the state of the art and practice in this area, and we expect the workshop to serve as a platform for the industry side to introduce the problems and challenges they face, as well as for the academia side to introduce their solutions and findings to the industry for broader impact.
Areas of interest include but are not restricted to:
Requirement analysis and specification of VR/AR software
Modeling and abstraction of VR/AR software
Testing and maintenance of VR/AR software
Performance measurement and optimization of VR/AR software
Program analysis and verification of VR/AR software
Security and privacy concerns in VR/AR software
Mining VR/AR software and software repositories and creation of dataset
Empirical studies on VR/AR software development process and products
VR/AR-based IDEs and coding tools
User studies of VR/AR-based software development techniques
VR/AR-based software visualization
Important dates
Paper submissions: August 26, 2025
Paper notifications: September 26, 2025
Paper camera ready: October 5, 2025
Workshop date: Nov 20, 2025
Submission details
Submissions must conform to the ASE 2025 formatting and submission instructions:
All submissions must be in PDF format and conform, at time of submission, to the
IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines
LaTEX users must use the \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEETran} without including the compsoc or compsocconf option.
The page limit of the submission is five pages with one additional page for references.
All the submissions must not have been published elsewhere or under review elsewhere when being
considered for VARSE 2025.
Similar to ASE, VARSE will employ a double-blind review process. Thus, no submission may reveal its authors’ identities. The authors must make every effort to honor the double-anonymous review process.
Please submit your papers through the following EasyChair link:
For accepted papers (except for talk abstracts), authors are required to prepare their final submissions for the workshop proceedings based on the suggestions provided by reviewers, and one author is expected to attend the workshop and present the paper.
Tianyi Liu, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science
Shuqing Li, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Xue Qin, Villanova University
José Miguel Rojas, The University of Sheffield
Xiaoyin Wang, The University of Texas at San Antonio
Wei Wang, The University of Texas at San Antonio
Xusheng Xiao, Arizona State University
Yicheng Zhang, University of California at Riverside
Program
Session 1: Openning and Invited Talk (14:00 - 15:30, Nov.20)
14:00-14:10 Opening
Workshop Chairs
14:10-14:50 Keynote: Challenges for Voice Control in VR/AR Applications
Frank Klassner, Villanova University
Abstract:This talk will explore challenging aspects behind determining proper context for voiced commands in VR/AR systems.
Bio:Frank Klassner is a Professor in Villanova's Computing Sciences Department and Director of Villanova's Center of Excellence in Enterprise Technology. His research has studied topics in high-level adaptive signal processing, educational robotics, simulation, and now virtual reality and augmented reality, using both CAVE and headset platforms. He has served as a member of the North America Lego Education Advisory Panel and as a consultant for VR projects for the Vatican Museums. He is past president of the Campus Alliance for Advanced Visualization (the CAAV), a professional organization for promoting best practices for VR on campuses.
14:50-15:30 Keynote: Beyond Accuracy: Engineering Trustworthy AI Software Systems
Jinqiu Yang, Concordia University
Abstract:As AI models become deeply embedded in life-critical applications such as autonomous driving, healthcare, and cybersecurity, success can no longer be defined by accuracy metrics alone. The real-world deployment of these AI software systems presents complex engineering challenges, where robustness and fairness are critical to the safe deployment of these life-critical systems. In this keynote, I will illustrate these challenges and present our solutions to ensure the engineering of trustworthy ML systems. First, I will introduce the safety and robustness challenges of autonomous driving systems (ADS), and discuss our recent works on evaluating and improving the robustness and efficiency of ADS. In particular, we address the significant performance challenge in ADS, such as that of a real-time system. Next, I will discuss our recent efforts to build trustworthy AI systems (fairness, transparency, and accountability), beyond ADS, including coding agents and robotics. Last, I will draw parallels between autonomous driving systems and emerging agentic AI systems, highlighting their shared engineering principles and the ongoing challenges in ensuring reliability, safety, and alignment in agentic systems.
Bio:Dr. Jinqiu Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University, where she leads the O-RISA Lab on reliable and trustworthy AI-powered software systems. Her research bridges software engineering for AI (SE4AI) and AI for software engineering (AI4SE), focusing on robustness of autonomous systems, trustworthy code generation with large language models, and software testing and repair. She serves as an Associate Editor for EMSE and TOSEM, and as program committee member for leading venues including ICSE, FSE, ASE, ISSTA, MSR, AAAI, and OOPSLA. She has co-chaired the ICSE 2019 Industry Event, SANER 2023 RENE Track, and CASCON 2025 Poster Track. Nationally, Dr. Yang serves on NSERC’s Discovery Evaluation Group for Computer Science and the Mila/CIFAR AI Insights for Policymakers Expert Group, advising government institutes on responsible AI policy.
Session 2: Paper Presentations (16:00 - 17:50, Nov. 20)
16:00-16:20 A Test Automation Framework for User Interaction in Extended Reality Applications
Ruizhen Gu, The University of Sheffield, UK
José Miguel Rojas, The University of Sheffield, UK
16:20-16:40 Demystifying the Privacy-Realism Dilemma in the Metaverse
Kadiray Karakaya, Heinz Nixdorf Institute at Paderborn University, Germany
Jonas Klauke, Heinz Nixdorf Institute at Paderborn University, Germany
Enes Yigitbas, Paderborn University, Germany
16:40-17:00 NavAI: A Generalizable LLM Framework for Navigation Tasks in Virtual Reality Environments
Xue Qin, Villanova University, USA
Matthew DiGiovanni, Villanova University, USA
17:00-17:20 A Conformance Checking System for Interaction Testing in Virtual Reality
Vijay Aravynthan, International Institute of Information Technology, India
Y. Raghu Reddy, International Institute of Information Technology, India
17:20-17:40 ARTRIP: Automatic AR Testing with Randomized Interaction Patterns
Maria Rivera, The University of Texas San Antonio, USA
Lisette Isais, The University of Texas San Antonio, USA
Xiaoyin Wang, The University of Texas San Antonio, USA