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MMVE 2008
The 1st International Workshop on Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments

Saturday March 8th, 8:30am - 5:00pm
Silver Legacy Resort Casino
Reno, Nevada, USA

Overview

With the increasing number of potential users of virtual and augmented reality systems, as indicated by the recent booming of massively multiuser online societies, the design of distributed, massively multiuser virtual environments (MMVEs) becomes more and more important, posing new requirements on both distribution platforms and virtual reality systems. Facing these challenges is a community-spanning effort, necessitating the pooling of the resources and experiences of the virtual reality and the networking and distributed computing communities. The aim of this workshop is to provide a link between these communities to foster the development of highly distributed, flexible and robust virtual environments. We aim to gather the practitioners and researchers in these fields under one roof to discuss their findings, incite collaboration and move the state of the art forward.

The workshop addresses the following topics:

1. Scalability, i.e. the ability to handle thousands of users at the same time, interacting via the global Internet.
2. Interactivity, i.e. how to provide highly responsive environments with near real time interaction despite network delay and jitter.
3. Bandwidth restricted (mobile) end user devices, e.g. the integration of mobile devices for nomadic augmented reality applications.
4. Dynamic & flexible distribution architectures, e.g. self-adapting client/server, peer-to-peer and hybrid architectures.
5. Consistency, i.e. providing guarantees concerning consistency to users of the distributed environment, despite the high level of responsiveness necessary and the experienced network delay.
6. Persistency, i.e. the ability to save and access the state of the virtual environment despite disconnections and faulty components.
7. Security & privacy, e.g. distributed authentication algorithms that allow users to participate in the environment securely and without fear of being spied on.
8. Implementation issues, e.g. novel approaches to effectively manage the complexity of developing applications for such environments.

In order to ensure a high quality technical session, paper submissions must cover one of the topics listed above, or a closely-related one. We will prioritize experience papers describing lessons learnt from built systems, including information about approaches that did and did not work, unexpected results, common abstractions, and metrics for evaluating distributed virtual environment distribution approaches. One of the key issues to debate is the underlying structure of distributed virtual environment systems, which includes different possible configurations such as peer-to-peer, central-server-based, and hybrid models. The workshop will provide a meeting point for researchers working in the field. We plan to encourage discussions based on the presented papers and come with a list of requirements for next generation distribution middleware.

Submitted papers should be about 5 pages long and use the IEEE proceedings format. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop.

Paper submissions will be handled online (see web site).

Accepted papers must be presented at the workshop. Selected papers will appear in a special issue of the International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication (IJAMC), subject to addressing all reviewer comments from MMVE and reformatting according to IJAMC formatting guidelines. If you have any questions, please email us at mmve@peers-at-play.org. More information can be found at the workshop web site at http://peers-at-play.org/MMVE08/.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: January 26th, 2008
Acceptance Notification: February 7th, 2008
Camera Ready Version: February 9th, 2008
Workshop Date: March 8 or 9, 2008

Organizers

• Gregor Schiele, University of Mannheim, Germany
• Daniel Weiskopf, Universität Stuttgart, Germany
• Ben Leong, National University of Singapore, Singapore
• Shun-Yun Hu, National Central University, Taiwan

Tutorial Program Committee

• Dewan Tanvir Ahmed, University of Ottawa, Canada
• Christian Bouville, IRISA, France
• Bing-Yu Chen, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
• Kuan-Ta Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
• Yiorgos Chrysanthou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
• Mike Eissele, University of Stuttgart, Germany
• Abdennour El Rhalibi, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
• Joerg Haehner, University of Hannover, Germany
• Aaron Harwood, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Jehn-Ruey Jiang, National Central University, Taiwan
• Pedro Morillo Tena, University of Valencia, Spain
• Jauvane C. Oliveira, LNCC, Brazil
• Juan Manuel Orduna, University of Valencia, Spain
• Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Canada
• Gwendal Simon, ENST Bretagne, France
• Sandeep Singhal, Microsoft Corporation, USA
• Shinichi Ueshima, Kansai University, Japan
• Arno Wacker, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Krzysztof Walczak, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
• Suiping Zhou, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore