3rd IEEE International Symposium on Emerging Metaverse (ISEMV 2026)

An IEEE symposium came to Larnaka this week, and the part worth knowing about is free, on Saturday, and does not require a conference ticket. The 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Emerging Metaverse (ISEMV 2026) runs 22–24 October 2026 at UCLan Cyprus, 12–14 University Avenue, Pyla, 7080 Larnaka, in hybrid format. The theme is "Metaverse for Humanity: Intelligent Virtual Worlds for Industry, Health, and Society". Start with the bit that is still open. The IEEE HIVE Innovation Sprint runs as a parallel track on Saturday 24 October, and the organisers are explicit on two points: participation is free, and registration for ISEMV 2026 is not required. Places are limited. Sign-up is a single Google Form: https://forms.gle/bhMjCtemguNRztpT9. What the sprint actually is. A team-based innovation sprint on real design challenges in immersive technology — not a coding competition. Teams define who they are designing for, frame the problem before reaching for a solution, weigh the ethical and accessibility implications of immersive systems, and then pitch to judges. The stated skills are design thinking, collaboration, communication, systems thinking and presentation.

• 09:00–11:30 — Part 1: opening, briefing, a masterclass on human-centred design, then the sprint itself with mentoring
• 14:00–16:00 — Part 2: team pitch showcase and awards

Who can take part. Undergraduate students and early-career professionals from any engineering, computing or technical discipline. No prior experience with metaverse technology is required — which, given how much of this field is gatekept by hardware access, is the unusual part. The research programme, if you want the full three days. Two keynotes anchor it. Maud Marchal, Full Professor at Univ. Rennes/INSA, opened Thursday with "Multimodal Haptics in eXtended Reality". Dejan Milojicic, HPE Fellow and VP at Hewlett Packard Labs, spoke Friday on "Digital Twin of Rack-Scale Systems" for AI infrastructure. Six paper sessions cover AR gaming, DAO governance, avatar identity, WebXR, workplace accessibility, the industrial metaverse, medical and diagnostic applications, LLM orchestration and agent architecture. Accepted papers are submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore. Saturday also carries two non-sprint tracks: twelve abstract presentations from 09:00–11:30 (heritage metaverse design, GenAI pedagogy, industrial adoption frameworks, VR in climate education), and from 11:45–13:00 a Horizon Europe project session — GeniVerse, MetaCities Hub, Sincere Project and XR5.0. That last hour is the practical one if you are looking for EU consortium partners rather than a pitch trophy. Why it is listed here. Cyprus rarely hosts an IEEE-sponsored symposium in this field, and the HIVE track is the only free, no-ticket, team-based design competition on the island this month aimed squarely at undergraduates. The symposium went hybrid deliberately — the organisers cite regional travel uncertainty — so the paper programme is reachable remotely even if the sprint is not. Registration for the full symposium is at easyconferences.org/isemv2026/register; the sprint uses the form above. The symposium is already under way as of 23 October — the Saturday sprint is the part still joinable. Session times are taken from the published programme; confirm the final running order on site, as the closing ceremony and the sprint's second half overlap on paper.

Event website