The open scientific event “TEAM and MULTI-AGENT DYNAMICS IN DIGITAL AND PHYSICAL REALITIES”, held in Montpellier on June 15–16, 2025, brought together leading minds from across disciplines to explore the complexity of multi-agent dynamics in both real-world and virtual environments. Co-organized by EuroMov and SHARESPACE, the workshop served as a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue between experts in cognitive science, neuroscience, movement science, sport and health sciences, artificial intelligence, robotics, animal studies, design, and the arts.
With nearly 100 participants from 18 countries, including representation from Europe, Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Canada, and the USA, the event shed new light on how we act, think, and experience together in interactive collective contexts whether those occur in the physical world or through emerging digital technologies such as Virtual and Extended Reality (VR/XR).
A key presence at the workshop were SHARESPACE partners: University of Montpellier, DeMontfort University, CYENS, CrdC, and UKE Hamburg, who presented various strands of their collaborative research within the SHARESPACE framework throughout the two-day event.
Highlights from SHARESPACE Partners
The University of Montpellier team presented a talk titled “Sharing Time & Space in Physical and Digital Realities”, focusing on how social connection depends on subtle, embodied coordination. As human interaction increasingly shifts online, VR promises new modes of embodied engagement—but how effectively does it support this kind of coordination? The talk explored how the SHARESPACE project seeks to understand the constraints and possibilities of VR for enabling rich multi-agent interaction.
In a joint talk titled “Using VR to Unravel the Computational, Physiological, and Motor Underpinnings of Social Threat Avoidance”, researchers investigated how social information—particularly fear—can be encoded in movement and transmitted through virtual spaces. Their work introduced a framework to analyze how movement kinematics carry meaning, how people interpret these signals, and how they can be amplified or attenuated in VR. The team presented evidence that fear-related information embedded in movement can be enhanced in virtual environments, providing valuable insight into mechanisms of social transmission and collective behavior.
Tackling a different dimension of multi-agent systems, the DeMontfort team offered a provocative talk titled “Who Needs Ethics in a Multi-Agent Virtual Space?”. Drawing on their Good Enough Ethics approach within SHARESPACE, the presentation explored how ethics must evolve to meet the challenges posed by heterogeneous agents in digital environments. The talk raised critical questions about whose ethics are represented, how ethical frameworks interact with political and technological biases, and whether current ethical standards are sufficient—or equitable—when non-human agents are involved. The implications for users, designers, and broader society were significant, particularly in light of trends such as AI bias, ethics washing, and user manipulation in the era of large language models and immersive tech.
The workshop not only advanced our understanding of multi-agent interactions in both physical and digital realities but also demonstrated the value of cross-disciplinary collaboration. From theoretical insights to experimental findings, participants left with new perspectives and partnerships that promise to shape future research in embodied coordination, social cognition, VR/XR systems, and ethical frameworks for human-machine interaction.
More information, including the full program of the event, is available at: https://tmd-2025.sciencesconf.org/program
