I am very happy and proud to announce that 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! All the team did a fantastic effort in preparing the demos before and during the conference and showcased extraordinary presentation, interaction and communication skills with the audience. Every year I get one more reason for being proud for our Electrical and Computer Engineering students and their unlimited potential!

Finally, besides the VVR (Visualization and Virtual Reality) Group and our research funding agency ΕΛΙΔΕΚ - HFRI and project PANOPTIS, special thanks go to our high-tech industrial sponsors AviSense.AI and Realiscape, whose support made the participation of the full student group to the conference possible.

Konstantinos Moustakas
Professor at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Patras