First Full Paper, and a Long Way to Niteroi
Transforming Design Reviews with XR was presented at ACM IMX 2025 in Niteroi last week. It is my first full paper, and the route it took to publication taught me more than the acceptance did.
The reviews came back between neutral and possibly accept. Five reviewers, broad agreement that the work was relevant and the industry evaluation was unusually strong, and broad agreement on the same three weaknesses: no quantitative performance metrics, a single industry partner, and no explicit comparison against existing no-code XR tools.
The committee agreed to publish subject to shepherding, which means somebody checks that you actually did what you promised in the rebuttal. I have come to think every paper should go through that. It is very easy to promise a comparison in a rebuttal and then quietly write two sentences. Having a shepherd read for it makes the promise real.
What I had to add
- A subsection on gaps in the existing literature on no-code XR methods for design review, including the absence of free or open source options for CAD to mesh translation.
- An honest limitations section acknowledging that behavioural data was recorded but not statistically analysed.
- A discussion of dependency on proprietary tooling, which remains the single biggest structural risk in this workflow.
- A tightened related work section, three tables instead of a dense narrative, and one flowchart replacing two.
The reviewer who asked for efficiency comparisons against traditional CAD review was right, and that request is a straight line to the capstone study I ran later in the year. Reviewers complaining about missing quantitative evidence are not being difficult. They are telling you what to do next.
On the trip itself: Brazil is a long way from Athlone, the visa took longer than the flights, and the travel grant was rejected. Worth it anyway. The questions after the talk came from people who build tools for industry rather than people who study industry, and that is a different and better kind of scrutiny.