MPEG-V

Call for Papers on “Standards for Virtual Worlds” in The Journal of Virtual World Research

Special Issue edited by Jean H.A. Gelissen, Philips Research, Netherlands, Marius Preda, Institut TELECOM, France, Samuel Cruz-Lara, LORIA / INRIA Nancy Grand Est, France, Yesha Sivan, Metaverse Labs and the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Israel.

The Journal of Virtual World Research http://www.jvwresearch.org/ is an online, open access academic journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research. The field of virtual world research is a continuously evolving area of study that spans across many disciplines and the JVWR editorial team looks forward to engaging a wide range of creative and scholarly work.

While the notion of virtual worlds in an evolving concept, to provide a base to build upon, we consider virtual worlds to be computer-based simulated environment where users interact with other users through graphic or textual representations of themselves utilizing textual chat, voice, video or other forms of communication. The term virtual worlds includes, is similar to, or is synonymous to the terms of virtual reality, virtual space, data-scape, metaverse, virtual environment, massively multiplayer online games, collaborative virtual environments, and immersive virtual environments.

After several issues addressing the technological, societal and economic aspects of Virtual Worlds, JVWR is calling for contributions related to standards, “formalized by standardization bodies” or “de facto ones”, that have or may have an impact in the large deployment of VW services, applications and products. Recent examples are the MPEG-V standard (http://wg11.sc29.org/mpeg-v/), published by ISO in 2011 and addressing interoperability of virtual objects and avatars and Web3D technologies for Real-Time 3D Communication (http://www.web3d.org) .

Authors are invited to submit their work, under the form of short paper for blind reviewed by the international Program Committee. The papers must be innovative, original, and contribute to the advancement of understanding virtual worlds related standard technologies. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• User Interfaces to access and manipulate objects in virtual worlds
• Money and solutions for virtual trading with real economical impact
• User Identity
• Scalability with respect to the number of concomitant users and complexity of virtual worlds
• Dependency
• Communication protocols and interchange media formats
• Cross-platform and multi-platform access to virtual worlds
• Multilinguality and e-inclusion

Submission instructions

Authors are invited to submit papers of up to 5 pages in PDF format via the JVWR Submission Site. Upon acceptance, the final revised paper is required also in electronic form. Accepted papers will be published online in the Volume 4, Number 2 of the Journal.

Deadlines

30 March: submission of one page abstract
15 April: reviewers’ feedback on the abstract
30 May: deadline for full paper
15 June: reviewers’ decision and comments for accepted papers
30 June: submission of final version
15 July: publication

Presentation slides are available for download and streaming

Call for Participation

The purpose of this event is to present and demonstrate MPEG-V, a new standard elaborated by MPEG and published by ISO in November 2010. MPEG-V based products and applications enable multi-sensorial user experience and interchange between virtual worlds. The standard is composed of several parts referring to

• architecture and use case scenarios,
• syntax and semantics of data formats for interaction devices, device commands, and sensed information,
• metadata to describe device capabilities and user preferences,
• metadata to represent sensory effects,
• metadata to represent virtual objects’ and avatars’ characteristics.

The MPEG-V awareness day is particularly targeted to developers of products and application for multi-sensorial user experience, content creators, broadcasters, multimedia device manufacturers, sensor & actuator manufacturers, virtual worlds and online game developers, persons interested in new opportunities in digital media.

Date & Venue

Tuesday-Wednesday, 25-26 January 2011, 10:00 – 17:00 , Hotel Inter-Burgo Exco, Daegu, Korea

Programme

During the demonstration session, several short movies will be presented: “Virtual Travel & SoundScape”, “Virtual Presence, Collaborative Working”, “Dynamic control of Virtual Humans” by Metaverse1 Project, “Face 2 Face Virtual Chat” by Tehnicolor and “Multisensory effects” by Klagenfurt University.

Registration

The event is free of charge but possible attendees shall register to this event via the MPEG-V Web Site at http://wg11.sc29.org/mpeg-v.