> Call for Papers Special Issue of Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual
> Environments
>
> Reflections on the Design and Implementation of Virtual
> Environment Systems
>
> Guest Editors: Anthony Steed, Dirk Reiners, and Marc Latoschik
>
> Virtual environment technologies are now being used by a wide range of
> laboratories, industries, educational establishments and hobbyists
> around the world. With the burgeoning power of home consoles, personal
> computers and mobile devices, we are hardly limited by the power of our
> technology, but we remain limited in the expressive power and ease of
> use of our software. This is not for lack of software; there are
> dozens, perhaps hundreds of virtual environment systems in use today,
> ranging from Open Source tool kits maintained by the community through
> networked game engines, both hobbyist and commercial through to
> fully-fledged "VR" systems with very broad support for devices. However,
> this range of software is also a potential achilles heel: there is a
> huge amount of functional replication in these software, subtle and not
> so subtle architectural differences which make porting a problem, and
> incompatible libraries that can not be exchanged.
>
> In this special issue, we invite the community to reflect on what
> features and design strategies have already or should underpin virtual
> environment systems of the future. We acknowledge that the field is
> broad, and it is not our intention to spark a debate on whether there
> should be a unified architecture for VE systems. We do want to solicit
> frank discussions about what features or conventions in existing
> software have proved their worth.
>
> Thus, topics of interest would include:
> - Comparisons between software architectures or classes of architecture
> - Reports of user experience with software
> - Analyses of reusability of application code
> - Novel taxonomies of VE systems
> - Programming models for VE systems
> - Reflections of expressiveness of interaction description code
> - Issues of code distribution over multiple processors
> - Networking abstracting and issues
> - Frank discussions on the failings or flaws of an existing system
> - Approaches/experience for the integration/interoperability of
> different architectures
> - Extensibility of existing interactive application standards such as
> X3D into the VR realm
>
> We would discourage authors from sending papers that describe new
> software or architectures unless that software and the paper are based
> on a critical analysis of a problem domain and contain critiques of
> existing approaches.
>
> Submission Deadline: January 31, 2009
>
> Please send documents in .pdf form to presence@mit.edu. Email
> attachments are preferred.
>
> Include contact information for the corresponding author in the body of
> the email. Papers should conform to the submission guidelines available
> at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/sub/pres
>
> Contact:
> Anthony Steed
> University College London
> Dept. of Computer Science
> Gower Street
> London WC1E 6BT
> United Kingdom
> Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 4435
> Fax: +44 (0)20 7387 1397
> Email: A.Steed@cs.ucl.ac.uk