http://research.nii.ac.jp/~iva2008/
Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) are autonomous, graphically embodied agents in a virtual environment that are able to interact intelligently with human users, other IVAs, and their environment.

IVA 2008 is the major annual meeting of the intelligent virtual agents community, attracting interdisciplinary minded researchers and practitioners from embodied cognitive modeling, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, animation, virtual worlds, games, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction.

2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku

Posted: March 12th, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none

http://www.iqpc.com/uk/secondlife/ediary
Second Life, the 3D internet world inhabited by over 5 million residents, is fast becoming the place for companies to test products, launch ideas and even run their entire business. With real world companies like Adidas, American Express, Coca Cola and Toyota all clamouring to set up their virtual ?islands?, how are you going to compete in this world unless you move fast?
This one-stop-shop will get you started in the fastest and most cost effective way possible.
Showcasing the best corporate islands, plus a hands-on tutorial to show you exactly how it?s done, your time out of the office will be the most valuable you spend all year.

Posted: February 25th, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none

http://www.webcommunities-conf.org/
The mission of this conference is to publish and integrate scientific results and act catalytically to the fast developing culture of web communities. The conference invites original papers, review papers, technical reports and case studies on WWW in particular the emerging role of so-called WWW-based Communities.

Domain: It is increasingly important for our culture to bring people together and to promote dynamics in professional organizations, mutual understanding, learning and harmony. Creating “virtual communities” is one major way to do this. The Web Based Communities 2007 conference aims at sharing and aggregating scientifically proven methods on how to organize and moderate WWW-based communities. These communities do not limit participants to particular locations - the international and multicultural dimension is a most challenging one. Good WWW communities undergo a continuous evolution and adapt to the changing world. The nature of these communities can be corporate, scientific, social or educational. Pragmatic questions which need to be addressed include: What software tools are the most adequate and how to use them? How to promote your community so that new members can find it? How to protect the members’ privacy? How to moderate discussions and how to provide information that people can use? How to create and maintain a sense of trust and commitment among the members? In addition, sociology, education, communication and philosophy issues are addressed as the main disciplines reflected in building WWW-based communities, although critical theories on societies and post-modernism are also relevant starting points. New and imminent technologies will be discussed.

The targeted audience is scientists and members and moderators of WWW communities who feel responsible for optimizing its quality and effect.
* Important Dates:
- Submission: 9 October 2006
- Notification to Authors: 15 December 2006
- Final Camera-Ready Submission and Early Registration: Until 8 January 2007
- Late Registration: After 8 January 2007
- Conference: Salamanca, Spain, 18 to 20 February 2007
Rua Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, 100, 3, 1050-209 Lisbon, Portugal

Posted: February 8th, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none

http://indep-day.upf.es/iveva/
The increasing amount of Artificial Intelligence (AI) added to Virtual Environments (VE) during the last few years has generated great research works in the intersection between both disciplines. This is the so-called Intelligent Virtual Environments area. Frequently this intersection takes place through the addition of intelligent agents to VE. These agents are also known as Virtual Agents.

The IVEVA conference aims to provide a friendly environment to discuss ideas in Intelligent Virtual Environments and Virtual Agents. In this sense, the conference is intended to promote the exchange of ideas between AI researchers and VE researchers and practitioners. We believe that this exchange between both disciplines will lead to exciting and fruitful discussions. IVEVA 2006 will be held in Aguascalientes (Mexico) on the 30-31 of October 2006.

TOPICS

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Agents applications
- Virtual assistants, avatars, believable agents
- Speech and language for virtual agents
- Multimodal Human/Agent Interaction
- Communicative Agents in Intelligent Virtual Environments
- Design and Implementation of Intelligent Virtual Environments
- Web based Virtual Environments
- Artificial life
- Human machine interaction
- Education
- Telerobotics
- Intelligent Tutoring Systems
- Virtual Laboratories
- Intelligent Interfaces
- Emotion architectures
- Virtual Heritage
- Emergent Narrative
- Self Animate Characters
- Agents in Videogames
- Planning in Videogames

ORGANISERS

Jes?s Ib??ez Mart?nez
University Pompeu Fabra
Barcelona, Spain
jesus.ibanez@upf.edu

Carlos Delgado Mata
University of Bonaterra
Aguascalientes, M?xico
cdelgado@bonaterra.edu.mx

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University
Bedrich Benes, Purdue University
Josep Blat, University Pompeu Fabra
Hiroyuki Fujioka, Tokyo Denki University
Pedro Garc?a L?pez, University Rovira i Virgili
Antonio Gomez-Skamerta, University of Murcia
Arturo Gutierrez, Rare
Fr?d?ric Kleinermann, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Sandy Louchart, The University of Salford
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Alejandro Padilla, Universidad Aut?noma de Aguascalientes
Felipe Padilla, Universidad Aut?noma de Aguascalientes
Zhigeng Pan, Zhejiang University
Helmut Prendinger, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo
Dirk Reiners, Iowa State University
Daniela Romano, University of Sheffield
Isaac Rudomin, ITESM Campus Estado de Mexico
Jesus Savage Carmona, DEP-FI, UNAM
Ana Luisa Solis, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM
Daniel Torres, Bioware Corp.

SUBMISSION

We invite the submission of papers on original and unpublished research on the above or closely related topics. Papers may be up to 10 pages long. They should follow the LNCS Springer format. Electronic submissions should be sent to:

jesus.ibanez@upf.edu AND cdelgado@bonaterra.edu.mx

Posted: February 3rd, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none

http://wise.vub.ac.be/metovr/
BACKGROUND
Nowadays, the design and development of a Virtual Reality application still requires considerable knowledge of VR technology. Although there are a number of tools to help the designer in the creation of his VR application, they are not non-VR expert friendly. For this reason, the design and development of a VR application is usually done by a VR expert. For most VR designs, the VR expert will first consult the client and/or the domain expert to become familiar with the concepts of the domain which are required for developing a VR application fulfilling the client?s expectations. In such an approach, the translation of the client?s requirements is done solely by the VR expert while the cooperation with the client and domain expert is limited. Problems may arise when the VR expert is not familiar with the domain. Then, the VR expert may lose a lot of time to get acquainted with the domain. The first prototype of the VR application often presents many shortcomings and usually does not match all the requirements of the client. As a consequence, several iterations will be needed before the result reaches an acceptable level of satisfaction for both the client and the end-users. Therefore, the development process is time consuming and expensive. The development time (and therefore the cost) can be reduced by involving the client and the domain expert more closely to the design process. To enable this, designing a VR application needs to be more intuitive and domain-oriented, i.e. it must be possible to express the design of a VR application in an intuitive way using domain terminology and high-level modeling concepts. This will enhance the communication between the domain expert and the VR expert and allow a closer cooperation. Furthermore the development of new open 3D standards file formats like X3D, makes VR becoming more accessible to a larger audience which will not necessarily be VR experts and yet want to be able to develop their own VR applications. This is another reason why the design of a VR application should become more intuitive and general.

In conclusion, we can state that in order to make the development of a VR application more accessible to non-VR experts and to reduce the time and cost of the development in general, there is a real need for methodologies and tools which will facilitate the design of a VR application. This Workshop aims at addressing these issues. It will be held in conjunction with the VSMM2005. The working language of the workshop will be English.

OBJECTIVES
In this workshop, we are particularly interested in methods and tools which facilitate the design of a VR application and which make this process more accessible for non-VR experts. Therefore, we are inviting research papers in this context.

The aim of the workshop is to provide a platform for bringing together researchers, practitioners and designers of VR applications to enable a productive exchange of ideas about the state of the art on designing VR applications.

TOPICS
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Conceptual and high-level specification techniques for designing VR applications or aspects of VR applications
* Methodologies for designing VR applications
* Graphical notations for designing VR applications (behaviors, interaction, complex objects, ?)
* Tool support for intuitive and domain oriented VR design
* Explicit use of domain knowledge in the design of VR applications
* The use of annotation in VR applications
* The use of ontologies and semantics in VR application design
* The use of text recognition to simplify the design of VR applications
* Application of Artificial Intelligence techniques for a more intuitive design of VR applications

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
Frederic Kleinermann (Frederic.Kleinermann@vub.ac.be),
Olga De Troyer (Olga.DeTroyer@vub.ac.be),
Bram Pellens(Bram.Pellens@vub.ac.be),
Wesley Bille(Wesley.Bille@vub.ac.be)

Address
WISE Laboratory, Department of Computer Science
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2 , 1050 Brussel, Belgium
Email: Frederic.Kleinermann@wise.vub.ac.be
Workshop MeTo-VR: http://wise.vub.ac.be/metovr/

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
o Jounghyun Gerard Kim, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Korea

o Nadia Thalmann, MIRAlab, University of Geneva, Switzerland

o Prasad Wimalaratne, School of Computing, University of Colombo, Sri lanka

o Carlos Delgado Mata, CINAVI (Centre for Research on Intelligent Virtual Environments) Engineering School Bonaterra University, Mexico

o Marc Cavazza, School of Computing, University of Teesside, UK

o Clive Fencott, School of Computing, University of Teesside, UK

o Chris Raymaekers, Expertise Centre for Digital Media (EDM), Belgium

o Maria Roussou, Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics Lab, Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK

o Olga De Troyer, Web & Information System Engineering Lab, Vrije
universiteit Brussel, Belgium

o Frederic Kleinermann, Web & Information System Engineering Lab,
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper submission: 24th of July, 2005
Notification of acceptance: 24th of August, 2005
Camera ready electronic paper: 9th of September, 2005
11th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia : October 3-7, 2005

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Papers should describe original and unpublished work about the above or closely related topics. Papers should not exceed 10 pages single spaced in length including images, figures, tables and references. The paper should also include the title of the paper, authors names, affiliations, postal addresses, e-mail addresses and the contact person for the paper. Authors should submit their manuscript electronically as a PDF file conform the paper template, which you can download here in Word format. The paper should be submitted to frederic.kleinermann@vub.ac.be .

REGISTRATION
To register for the workshop, send an email to frederic.kleinermann@vub.ac.be .

ANNOUNCEMENT OF PROCEEDINGS
Negotiations are currently conducted to publish accepted workshop contributions.

Ename Center

Posted: January 22nd, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none

http://www.vsmm.org/2005/
VIRTUAL REALITY AT WORK IN THE 21ST CENTURY

This year marks the return of the International Conference on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia to Europe. VSMM2005 continues to push the boundaries of Virtual Reality and Multimedia research by focusing on the impact on society. Virtual Reality is no longer considered novelty or a wonder ? but a living reality in the lives of millions of people all over the world. It is therefore time to take a closer look at how Virtual Reality interacts with society, how it affects its users, and how it promotes or directs social change. The theme of the VSMM2005 Conference is Virtual Reality?s present or potential impact on 21st century society in the fields of Heritage, Education, Applied VR Technology, and Entertainment and the Arts. It will also feature a special session in which the theme of professional guidelines and health, safety, and usability issues will be addressed.
VSMM2005 will be held for the first time in Belgium, in the historic town of Ghent.
Hosted by the Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation, VSMM2005 will take place in the Flanders Expo conference building
Abdijstraat 13-15

Posted: January 20th, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none

http://www.virtualityconference.it
VIRTUALITY CONFERENCE is an International Conference on Digital Cinema, Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics, Animation and Visual Effects. The conference will take place in Turin, Italy, from 3rd to 5th November 2005. The Conference has an established audience and receives great press coverage. It has featured presentations from major players in the field, such as appearances by Richard Taylor, Syd Mead, Rob Legato, Anthony Lamolinara and Scott Ross.

Corso Lombardia 194

Posted: January 19th, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none

http://www.ismar04.org
In the last decade Mixed Reality (MR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have evolved from being experimental technologies to mainstream research activities that are starting to show impact on industry and society. By their very nature, MR and AR are highly interdisciplinary fields involving signal processing, computer vision, computer graphics, user interfaces, human factors, wearable computing, mobile computing, computer networks, distributed computing, information access, information visualization, and hardware design for new displays and sensors. MR/AR concepts are applicable to a wide range of applications.
The International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality is the premier forum in the field. A series of independent conferences on Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality started in 1999, and has led to a joint symposium in 2002, This year we are proud to present the third installment of the series, the 3rd IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR04).

The symposium will be held from Nov 2-5, 2004, in Arlington, VA (near Washington, DC). It will be co-located with the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, ISWC04 (Oct 31-Nov 3, 2004), to bring together the MR/AR and wearables communities. We invite you all to participate in this great event for the exchange of new ideas in this exciting field!

Posted: January 13th, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none

http://www.simtect.com
Title: SimTecT 2004 Simulation Conference and Exhibition
Location: National Convention Centre, Canberra, Australia
Dates: 24-27 May 2004
URL: http://www.simtect.com

Short Description

Held annually since 1996, SimTecT is becoming the premier simulation conference in the Australasian region. SimTecT includes international keynotes, technical and applications papers, workshops, special presentations, exhibition and social program.

Description

The SimTecT 2004 Simulation Conference and Exhibition, will be held 24-27 May 2004 in Canberra, Australia.
Papers and keynotes will particularly address the Defence, Manufacturing, Transport and Medical sectors - but, together with the exhibtion, will be of interest to others as well.

SimTecT has been held annually since 1996, and is becoming the premier simulation conference in the Australasian region.
A feature is the quality of the papers, largely because of the contribution of the Defence Science Technology Organisation to the Technical Committee which vets the papers.

Keynote Speakers

Simulation in Defence Acquisition - Sir Robert Walmsley, KCB FREng , former Chief Executive of the UK?s Defence Procurement Agency
Enhancing Crtitical Decision Outcomes - Major-General James Molan, AO , Commander Australian Defence College
Can Flight Simulators do Everything? - Capt. Kip Caudrey, Director, Simulator Evaluation and Standards, Asia/South Pacific, Alteon Training Asia
Entertainment and Defense Collaboration - Professor Michael Zyda, Director, the Moves Institute, US Naval Postgraduate School
High Fidelity Patient Simulators - Professor David M. Gaba, M.D., Director, Patient Safety Center of Inquiry at VA Palo Alto Health Care System, and Professor, Department of Anesthesia, Stanford University
The Power of Virtual Reality Training for Improved Operating Room Performance - Professor Tony Gallagher, Director of Research in the Department of Surgery, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

Workshops

On Monday 24 May, a series of workshops will allow a more in-depth presentation of simulation topics:

Introduction to Simulation and Virtual Environments - Paul Beckett, RMIT
Hands-on HLA - David Stratton, University of Ballarat
An Overview of Simulation Standards - Shane Arnott, Boeing Australia, and Warren Katz, Chairman SISO
Computer Generated Forces Behavioural Models and Agent Enabled Simulation - Dr Simon Goss, DSTO and Dr Andrew Lucas, Agent Oriented Software
Getting Results ? Simulation and Achieving Organisational Objectives - Peter Murphy, Noetic Solutions and Peter Dyson, Manage by Design
Human Factors Workshop ? Where is The Learning Happening? - Elyssebeth Leigh, Dr Robert Mclaughlan, Laraine Spindler, University of Technology, Sydney
Visual Database Development - Patrick Bell, Thales, Graeme Brook, VIZMAP, Dave McKeown, Terrasim

Special Presentations

Australian Defence Simulation Office - the status of ADSO activities and Defence projects
Simulation Standards - Proposed Australian Defence Force Platform DIS Enumerations
Ten Commandments of Modeling and Simulation ? a Paradigm Shift - John Illgen

Health and Medical Simulation Symposium

Held in conjunction with SimTecT 2003 on 24 to 26 May, the Health and Medical Simulation Symposium will include presentations on simulation technology and clinical applications, with the theme: “Simulation Safer than Reality?”.
Participants can also tour the exhibition.

Wargame Cafe

Drop into a special part of the Exhibition area where PC “Games” are used for serious purposes.

Site Visits

There are site visit on Thursday 27 May to:

Academy of Interactive Entertainment - Specialising in 3D computer graphics, games programming and design education, the Academy provides real pathways to employment through outcomes-based training approved by industry and delivered through industry.
CSIRO Division of Mathematical and Information Science - collaborative multi-modal virtual reality, including the use of haptics

These visits will give participants a chance to look at some of the latest simulation related technology..

Social Functions

SimTecT Golf Challenge - Monday 24 May, afternoon at the Gungahlin Lakes Golf Club.
Welcome Reception - Monday 24 May, evening
Social Evening - Tuesday 25 May, night at Flavours ? The Culinary Centre
Conference Dinner - Wednesday 26 May, night at the National Museum of Australia

Point of Contact

Barry Neame
Conference Secretariat
PO Box 3127, BMDC, ACT 2617, Australia
Tel: +61 2 6251 0675
Fax: +61 2 6251 0672
Email: simtect@consec.com.au

Publicity Contact

Peter Hill
Simcon Services Pty Ltd
PO Box 226, Lindfield, NSW 2070, Australia
Tel: +61 417 457 105
Fax: +61 2 9416 3783
Email: exec@siaa.asn.au

Organisers

Simulation Industry Association of Australia - aiming to promote and development the use of simulation in Australia
http://www.siaa.asn.au

PO Box 226, Lindfield, NSW 2070, Australia

Posted: January 13th, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none

http://www.science.uva.nl/~elenaz/ICCS04/IVIT04.htm
The rapid development of interaction and modelling techniques, computer graphics and visualisation systems is expected to make our work and learning more efficient and leisure more fascinating. The main question addressed by the Workshop is how to simplify the work of a user, to make the interaction process more appealing and intuitive. This question is becoming especially crucial when we talk about Problem Solving Environments, designed to hide the intricacies of computer modelling of physical phenomena and guide a researcher towards a meaningful solution. The goal of the Workshop is to bring together people and technologies from a variety of disciplines to share ideas and appropriate experimental results that have potential impact on these multi-disciplinary fields. The workshop submission will be accepted from academic, industrial and commercial fields.

IV&IT 2004 is the follow-up of the International Workshop on Scientific Visualisation and Human-Machine Interaction in a Problem Solving Environment held in conjunction with the ICCS 03 Conference.

You are invited to submit full papers of 6 to 10 pages (Letter or A4 paper) for oral presentation. Submitted papers have to be original, containing new and original results. The submitted paper must be camera-ready and formatted according to the rules of LNCS. See http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html for formatting information. All papers selected for the IV&IT 2004 Workshop will be peer-reviewed and included into the ICCS 04 conference proceedings. The proceedings of the Conference will be published in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. A compressed Postscript or PDF version of your paper should be submitted by email at elenaz@science.uva.nl.

Workshop Organisers:

Chair: Dr. Elena Zudilova (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

Co-chair: Tony Adriaansen (Telecommunications & Industrial Physics CSIRO, Australia)

Program Committee:

Dr. Yang Cai (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Dr. Judith Klein-Seetharaman (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Dr. Piet Kommers (University of Twente, the Netherlands)
Prof. Gregory O’Hare (University College Dublin, Ireland )
Prof. Binh Pham (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)

Kruislaan 403, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Posted: January 12th, 2001 under Computers: Virtual_Reality.
Comments: none