Special Session on Collaboration and Communication in Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds combine 3D web technologies with social networking techniques to offer new models of user interactions, collaborative learning, information sharing, and present new business opportunities. Collaboration and communication in virtual worlds are key to the success of these models.  Using advances from various studies on virtual reality environments, existing virtual worlds provide a rich environment for users to provide new and innovative end user services.

These end user services depend on  multiple users collaborating in shared spaces, interaction with other users and with other worlds, real time nature of user interactions in virtual environments, collaboration and communication tools in virtual environments, scalability, and security.  The goal of this special session on Collaboration and Communication in Virtual Worlds is to provide a forum for researchers, architects, and practitioners for discussing these and other related issues to collaboration and communication in virtual worlds and virtual environments.

We solicit papers covering various topics that include (but not limited to) the following:

     * Sharing Spaces in VR environments
     * User Interactions in VR
     * Real-time or immediacy of  interactions
     * Chat, voice, or video communication in virtual worlds
     * Collaboration tools and techniques in VR  applications
     * Social networking in VR environments
     * Collaborative learning in Virtual Worlds
     * Consumer-business interactions
     * Enterprise collaboration in VWs
     * Scalability, security, and persistence of VR

Submission Instructions
Authors are invited to submit regular technical papers or position papers. The position papers should present novel technologies at an early stage of development or share future vision. All submissions should describe original, previously unpublished research, not currently under review by another conference or journal. Manuscripts should not exceed five (5) pages in double-column IEEE format. Please submit the paper through EDAS.  Formatting details can be found under  Author Information on the CCNC web site.

Session Organizer
Krishna Kishore Dhara, Avaya Labs Research,    dhara@research.avayalabs.com