EVENT DETAILS

Vizij: Expressive Robot Faces Workshop and Tutorial at HRI 2026

What is Vizij?

Vizij is a community-driven, open-source software platform/ecosystem for designing, animating, and deploying rendered robot faces (“visages”) developed to address existing fragmentation in rendered robot face infrastructure. Vizij is currently used and developed by Semio Community, Quori, and Peerbots, with ongoing community efforts to support for other popular robot platforms.

Workshop + Tutorial @ HRI 2026

As Vizij is an open source platform and ecosystem, we are actively expanding our community, including users, contributors, and partners. HRI is the premier venue for researchers with expertise on effective and expressive social robot interaction via the face. We are hosting a workshop and tutorial hybrid (the first of its kind) in which we will (1) engage with and learn from the HRI research community, and (2) give back through a hands-on tutorial of the Vizij platform tailored to HRI researchers. The morning, half-day workshop component gathers experts on HRI particularly interested in robot facial animation and expression (e.g., gaze, emotion, and lip synchronization). The afternoon, half-day tutorial component is specifically designed for HRI researchers interested in simplifying, speeding up, and easing replicability of their studies that involve robot faces.

Who should attend?

We designed the tutorial for a broad audience from industry and academia and for both junior PhD students as well as advisors / Principal Investigators (PIs). The tutorial is for those who want their robot faces to “just work” as well as those who want to fully customize a robot face to run user studies evaluating those customizations.

Schedule

We will begin in the morning with the workshop portion and begin the tutorial in the afternoon after lunch.

Morning Workshop (9:30 am - 1:00 pm)

9:30 am: Workshop Introduction

9:45 am: Paper Presentations

Rendering Robot Faces for Robot Caregiving: A Case Study in Robot-Assisted Bed Bathing, Rishabh Madan and Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee
Beyond Utility: Expressive Robot Faces as a Medium for Creative Agency and Personalization in Older Adult Care, Laura Stegner
Using Robot Faces to Facilitate Emotional Awareness in Human-Human-Robot Self-Disclosures, Nyomi Morris and Tom Williams
Real-Time Face Customization for Therapeutic Robots: Addressing the Temporal Barrier to Clinical Deployment, Denielle Oliva and David Feil-Seifer
Designing facial expressions to convey states of being via a social robot, Michael Cabrera, John Kim and Alyssa Kubota
A Component-Based Approach to Humanoid Robot Face Design for Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy, Nazerke Rakhymbayeva
Expressive Faces for Emy: an Autism Supporting Robot, Miriam Martin Sanchez and Raquel Ros
Alpaca: An Interactive Platform for Social Robot Navigation, Pranav Goyal, Jiamu Liu, Andrew Stratton, Tisha Jain and Christoforos Mavrogiannis
Practical Trade-offs in Generative Robot Expression Design, Victor Nikhil Antony, Shiye Cao and Chien-Ming Huang
Expressive Robot Faces in the Wild: Lessons from Multi-Robot Practice with Children, Anara Sandygulova, Aruzhan Kaltay, Arailym Munaitpas and Zhannur Salkenova

11:05 am: Coffee Break

11:20 am: Invited Speakers & Panel

Nathan Dennler, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Chinmaya Mishra, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Cynthia Matuszek, Associate Professor at University of Maryland Baltimore County
Séverin Lemaignan, Research Scientist at the Spanish National Centre for Scientific Research (CSIC)

1:00 pm Lunch

Afternoon Tutorial (2:30 pm - 6:00 pm)

2:30 pm: Tutorial Introduction

2:45 pm: Activity 1 - Getting started with Face Design & Control

Hello Face: getting started importing, exporting, and controlling a robot face.
Renderer Data Model: The Vizij renderer, underlying data, and how that data can be modified
Rigging: Standard and custom control rigs in Vizij

3:30 pm: Technical Support or Exploration Time

3:45 pm : Activity 2 - Face Animation, Integration, and Deployment

Now we are talking: integrating a robot face with a real time conversation engine.
Animations: defining, saving, and loading animations.
Deployment: Going from your computer to your robot.

4:30 pm: Technical Support or Exploration Time

4:45 pm: Coffee Break

5:00 pm: Vizij Roadmap, Research, and Strategic Planning Breakouts

6:00 pm: Tutorial Concludes

Workshop Submission Topics

We are inviting researchers to submit short (2-4 pages) or full (6-8 pages) papers discussing:

the role, rationale, and intention for robot faces;
emotion and gaze in human-robot interaction (HRI);
robot and virtual character animation for HRI; or
experiences with expressive robot faces in practice.

Please follow the HRI conference submission formatting guidelines in creating your papers. (Anonymization of submissions is optional.) Please make your submissions at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vizijhri2026.

Key Workshop Dates:

Participant Support Request Deadline: ~~January 21st, 2026~~ Extended to February 12th, 2026
Early Paper Submission Deadline: ~~January 21st, 2026~~
Early Paper Notification Date: ~~January 28th, 2026~~
Early Bird Conference Registration Deadline: Jan 31st 2026
Paper Submission Deadline: February 12th, 2026
Paper Notification Date: February 19th, 2026

Participant Support

Participant support is available (up to $1,500 per eligible participant) thanks to the NSF-funded Quori project! We will be tailoring activities to attendees’ robot(s) and research interests. Please complete this form by January 21st, 2026 to inform the organizing team about your interest in robot faces and/or request participant support.