Web3D 2026 is honored to feature an exceptional lineup of keynote speakers whose leadership continues to shape the future of open 3D standards and immersive technologies.
Prof. Joaquim Jorge
Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Web, Lies and Videotape: What Collaborative Extended Reality Needs From the Open Web
Collaboration in extended reality rests on one requirement. Two people who are apart must agree on what “there” means. The field has long pursued fidelity, on the assumption that closer to reality means better performance. Twenty years of building systems for surgical telementoring, immersive radiology, virtual endoscopy and remote training taught us otherwise. We warp gestures and displace avatars, and pointing survives the crossing. We redirect walking and bend portals, and people move through spaces that are not there. We fake touch through pseudo-haptics, because real force feedback needs a millisecond and will never cross a network. The distortions are doing the work. Reference between collaborators lives in a slow enough band to cross continents, but a pointing act sent without its moment arrives designating the wrong thing. Meanwhile our representations are drifting from structure toward capture, ever more like reality and containing nothing that can be named, addressed, validated or cited. I will argue that the open web is the only place where addressability, provenance and a temporal model of reference can survive that drift. And I will end with a question. Which of these useful lies can open standards carry, and which will each of us keep reinventing alone?
Prof. Joaquim Jorge is a Full Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, where he founded the Computer Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction and Extended Reality research group at INESC-ID. He holds the UNESCO Chair on Artificial Intelligence and Extended Reality, has served as Editor-in-Chief of Computers & Graphics for nineteen years, and is President-Elect of the IEEE Computer Society, assuming the presidency in 2027. He has held leadership roles at IEEE VR, ACM IUI and Eurographics, and was General Chair of IEEE Virtual Reality 2021. His work develops multimodal systems combining eye-gaze, gestures and haptics to support collaboration and training in clinical and industrial settings. Recent projects include MAGIC and SPARC, on remote collaboration in virtual reality, and XAVIER, which applies artificial intelligence to multimodal input for diagnosis and training. He has authored over 378 peer-reviewed publications, attracting more than 14,000 citations, and appears on the Stanford top two percent researchers list. He is an ACM Distinguished Member and Speaker, an IEEE Distinguished Contributor and Visitor, a Fellow of the IEEE and of Eurographics, and a member of the IEEE VR Academy.
Prof. Yeliz Yesilada
Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus (METU NCC) and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.
Pearls and Web Users: Accessibility as an Engineering Principle
Collaboration in extended reality rests on one requirement. Two people who are apart must agree on what “there” means. The field has long pursued fidelity, on the assumption that closer to reality means better performance. Twenty years of building systems for surgical telementoring, immersive radiology, virtual endoscopy and remote training taught us otherwise. We warp gestures and displace avatars, and pointing survives the crossing. We redirect walking and bend portals, and people move through spaces that are not there. We fake touch through pseudo-haptics, because real force feedback needs a millisecond and will never cross a network. The distortions are doing the work. Reference between collaborators lives in a slow enough band to cross continents, but a pointing act sent without its moment arrives designating the wrong thing. Meanwhile our representations are drifting from structure toward capture, ever more like reality and containing nothing that can be named, addressed, validated or cited. I will argue that the open web is the only place where addressability, provenance and a temporal model of reference can survive that drift. And I will end with a question. Which of these useful lies can open standards carry, and which will each of us keep reinventing alone?
Prof. Yeliz Yesilada is Professor of Computer Engineering at Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus (METU NCC) and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), specifically user behavior modelling, web accessibility, eye-tracking, and AI-driven applications. A leading researcher in web accessibility, Prof. Yesilada received multiple best-paper awards and co-edited a leading research book on web accessibility. She co-founded the International Web for All Conference (W4A), contributed to the work of W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), and consults internationally with governments on web accessibility frameworks and training. Further information about Prof. Yesilada is available at yelizyesilada.info.
Patrick Cozzi, CEO of Cesium, now CPO of Bentley Systems brings his pioneering work in 3D Tiles and open geospatial ecosystems, offering a forward‑looking perspective on scalable, interoperable 3D for the web.