KAIST develops world's first XR webtoon platform with eye tracking, haptic feedback

"It feels like reading a webtoon on an IMAX screen."

South Korean researchers have developed what they say is the world's first next-generation extended reality (XR) comics platform, allowing users to experience webtoons in three dimensions.

KAIST announced Tuesday that a research team led by Ian Oakley, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, has developed ComiXR, a new platform that lets users both read and create comics in an XR environment.

ComiXR lets users arrange comic panels, characters, speech bubbles, backgrounds and 3D elements within an XR space, and combine XR features such as eye tracking and 3D rendering as they see fit.

Comics evolved from print books into vertically scrolling webtoons with the rise of smartphones, fueling explosive growth in the medium. The research team identified XR devices as the next step in that evolution, building the ComiXR platform on the Meta Quest Pro to incorporate spatial depth, three-dimensional audio and eye tracking — features difficult to replicate on a flat screen.

Participants in the study wore the headset and freely arranged 3D characters, speech bubbles and sound-effect text inside a real room, constructing a comic-reading space tailored to their own comfort and sense of immersion.

Experiment results showed that readers strongly preferred presentations that made active use of real-world spatial depth over simply displaying flat comic pages in virtual space. Placing characters behind backgrounds and separating speech bubbles onto distinct layers significantly boosted immersion. A standout feature used eye tracking to reveal a character's next line of dialogue only when the reader looked directly at that character, effectively preventing spoilers.

The platform also delivered sensory experiences impossible in conventional comics: special effects triggered by changes in a reader's facial expression, and haptic feedback — technology that conveys information through vibration and touch — that transmitted a character's heartbeat directly to the user.

The research team expects XR comics to serve not as a replacement for smartphone webtoons but as a new platform for special exhibitions and educational content that bring a work's fictional world to life, as well as a tool for improving cultural accessibility for visually impaired users and those with low vision.

"This research is not simply about rendering comics in three dimensions — it proposes how future comics should be designed by accounting for the reader's space, gaze and movement," Oakley said. "If it reaches practical application, it could develop into an XR version of existing digital comics platforms like Naver Webtoon."

The findings were presented at ACM DIS 2026, the leading international academic conference on human-computer interaction and design. The ComiXR platform has been released as open-source software, making it freely available to anyone.