The LIRIS XR Lab

The LIRIS XR Lab (CNRS, LIRIS laboratory) is based at Centrale Lyon ENISE in Saint-Étienne, France. Our research focuses on eXtended Reality (XR) technologies and their applications, guided by one question:

How can we understand and improve the quality of the user experience in immersive 3D applications?


Our Research Topics

Our distinctive angle is multisensory immersion. Beyond audiovisual rendering, we develop olfactory, thermal, and haptic devices for 6 Degrees of Freedom (6-DoF) XR experiences and study how users actually behave in these multisensory environments.

At the core of our work is SensoXR, our experimental platform for 6-DoF multisensory XR and user behavior analysis. It integrates state-of-the-art VR/MR/AR headsets, infrared motion capture, and 64 speakers for spatialized sound, along with multisensory displays and tools for physiological and behavioral analysis. SensoXR is both our instrument and our object of research: we use it to run user experiments and study human behavior, and each study pushes us to extend it with new devices, algorithms, and software.

We believe in open science and regularly provide public datasets, open-source software, and open hardware. Our main target applications are cultural heritage, healthcare, and immersive learning.

Current Topics

  • Multisensory 6DoFs XR Experiences.
  • Olfactory / Thermal / Haptic devices for XR.
  • 3D Human Pose Reconstruction.
  • Physiological Data Acquisition and Analysis.
  • User Behavior Acquisition and Analysis.
  • Virtual Agents.

Current Thesis

Recent Funded Projects

  • MEMORA (2026-2029) - Funding from the Médéric Alzheimer Foundation - Motor-based memory training for the rehabilitation of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
  • PHC Ulysses - Multimodal capture of human behaviour for modelling multisensory collaborative virtual reality applications.
  • Menechme (2024-2025) - Funded by CNRS - New audio-visual capture and restitution methodologies for intangible cultural heritage.
  • ANR Renforce (2023–2027) - French Research Agency funding. Reflexive Multisensory Immersive Environment for Chemical Risk Training.
  • Promess (2022-2025) Funded by Région Auvergne Rhône-Alpes, France - Multisensory Mixed Reality for Cultural Heritage.