Latest Advances and Prospects in Extended Reality Technologies

Dear Colleagues,

Electronics is pleased to announce a Special Issue dedicated to exploring the latest advances in extended realities technologies, comprising of both software and hardware, and their future prospects in education, industrial training, digital heritage, health, sports, and entertainment. We invite researchers and experts from diverse disciplines to contribute their original research articles, reviews, conceptual frameworks, and case studies.

Objective:

The rapid evolution of immersive technologies—spanning the full spectrum of Extended Reality (XR)—is fundamentally reshaping sectors such as education, industrial training, digital heritage, and entertainment. As both hardware capabilities and software architectures advance at an unprecedented pace, there is a growing need to examine these developments through an integrated lens.

This Special Issue aims to highlight recent breakthroughs and future directions in immersive technologies, inviting original research at the intersection of electronics, computer science, and speculative design. We encourage the submission of both applied and theoretical work that explores the technical frontiers of XR, as well as the sociotechnical frameworks that govern its use.

We seek to provide an interdisciplinary forum for exploring advancements in software and hardware with applications in health, sports, education, and beyond. Notably, this issue welcomes speculative design and design fiction approaches that critically address ethical and sociotechnical challenges emerging from the convergence of immersive technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In this Special Issue, we welcome original research articles and reviews.

Research areas include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Extended reality;
• Virtual reality;
• Augmented reality
• Human–computer interaction;
• Accessibility and inclusion in extended reality;
• Artificial intelligence applications to extended reality;
• User interfaces;
• Speculative design;
• Design fiction;
• Immersive serious games;
• Immersive gamification
• Immersion;
• Digital heritage;
• Immersive training and education;
• Immersive health and medicine;
• Immersive sports and e-sports;
• Multisensory experiences;
• Haptics;
• Smell, scent, and olfaction;
• Hardware advancements;
• Conceptual and human-centric frameworks;
• Ethical considerations.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Marco Gilardi
Dr. Soheeb Khan
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• electronics
• immersive technologies
• human–computer interaction
• accessibility and inclusion
• extended reality
• virtual reality
• augmented reality
• mixed reality
• speculative design
• design fiction
• research through design
• design science research
• multisensory
• human-centric design