UCF Team Earns Best Interaction Product of the Year at 2026 AWE Auggie Awards

June 25, 2026

Faculty and students from the University of Central Florida Institute for Simulation & Training (UCF IST) earned one of the extended reality industry’s highest honors after their immersive robotics project won the 2026 Auggie Award for Best Interaction Product of the Year at the Augmented World Expo (AWE), held June 15-18 in Long Beach, California.

The Auggie Awards are among the augmented and virtual reality industry’s most prestigious honors, recognizing groundbreaking innovations and the people advancing immersive technologies.

The UCF-led project, “Be There Without Being There: Humanoid Robot Immersive Telepresence,” emerged as the winner after competing against more than 330 entries submitted across the Auggie Awards program, including finalists from Google, Sony, and other leading innovators in extended reality and spatial computing.

The humanoid robot combines augmented reality, robotics and immersive visualization to allow users to operate it remotely in real time. Using an extended reality headset, users can see through the robot’s perspective and control its movements from a distance, creating the sensation of being physically present in another location.

The technology has potential applications in manufacturing, emergency response, healthcare, education and other environments where remote operation can improve safety, accessibility and collaboration.

The project was co-led by Carolina Cruz-Neira, executive director of the Pegasus Research Institute (PRI) and director of the UCF Institute for Simulation & Training (IST); Dirk Reiners, associate professor in UCF’s Department of Computer Science and co-director of the Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory (VARLAB); and Mohsen Rakhshan, director of UCF IST’s Laboratory for Interaction of Machine and Brain (LIMB).

“I’m incredibly proud of what our faculty, students and collaborators accomplished together. This recognition reflects years of research and innovation focused on making human-robot interaction more intuitive, immersive and impactful,” Cruz-Neira said. “Seeing our work recognized alongside some of the world’s leading technology companies was an exciting milestone for the entire UCF community.”

The recognition underscores UCF’s leadership in simulation, robotics and extended reality research. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, researchers at IST and the College of Engineering and Computer Science have continued developing technologies that improve how people interact with digital and physical worlds.