Introduction
With the increasing number of potential users of virtual and augmented reality systems, as indicated by the recent boom of massively multiuser online societies, the design of distributed, massively multiuser virtual environments 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. Following up on last year’s very successful workshop (MMVE’08) at IEEE VR, 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.
Workshop Theme
In the near future, virtual and augmented reality technology will become more and more available for the general public. Modern standard PCs are equipped with enough computing and graphical powers to enable highly detailed simulations and presentations of virtual environments at home. Meanwhile, alternative mixed reality hardware, e.g. highly portable projection systems, graphical mobile systems, becomes available and the miniaturization of electronic devices leads to electronically enhanced so-called smart devices, which make new forms of interaction with virtual and augmented environments possible, both stationary and on the move. Thus, the potential user base of virtual and augmented reality systems will increase immensely. To profit from this trend, virtual reality (VR) systems must extend beyond relatively local environments for few participants and provide a platform to allow users all over the world to interact with each other in a shared virtual environment. This requires future VR systems to build upon a set of robust and scalable distribution techniques.
The goal of this workshop is to provide a critical analysis of existing distribution approaches for virtual environments and to identify key challenges and techniques that are required for bringing VR systems into the global internet, interconnecting thousands of users in a single environment. To do so, the workshop will bring together researchers from the areas of virtual environment and distribution techniques. More specifically the workshop addresses the following issues:
* Scalability, i.e. the ability to handle thousands of (possibly nearby) users at the same time, interacting via the global Internet.
* Interoperability, i.e. the ability to integrate multiple virtual worlds and/or service providers, e.g. using common protocols or universal clients.
* Interactivity, i.e. how to provide highly responsive environments with near real time interaction despite network delay and jitter.
* Bandwidth restricted (mobile) end user devices, e.g. the integration of mobile devices for nomadic augmented reality applications.
* Dynamic and flexible distribution architectures, e.g. selfadapting client/server, peer-to-peer and hybrid architectures.
* Content streaming, e.g. sound and 3D streaming.
* Consistency, i.e. providing consistency guarantees to users of the distributed environment, despite the high level of responsiveness necessary and the experienced network delay.
* Persistency, i.e. the ability to save and access the state of the virtual environment despite disconnections and faulty components.
* Security and privacy, e.g. distributed authentication algorithms that allow users to participate in the environment securely and without fear of being spied on.
* Implementation issues, e.g. novel approaches to effectively manage the complexity of developing applications for such environments.
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, centralserver-based, and hybrid models. The workshop will provide a meeting point for researchers working in the field. This workshop is the second edition, following up on last year’s very successful workshop (MMVE’08) at IEEE VR.
Workshop Format
The workshop focus is on exchange of ideas and discussion. Thus the format includes enough slots for open discussions. The workshop will have three parts. The first part will be an invited keynote talk, preferably from an industrial speaker. In the second part, we will have multiple sessions, each consisting of about 3 talks. We will have dedicated slots for discussions by grouping discussions at the end of a session and fostering the speakers to a small panel covering the topic of the session. The last part of the workshop will consist of a common panel discussion including all participants. The discussion will address specific research questions. We will actively involve each participant into the discussion, thereby integrating participants that are not speakers.
The target audience consists of practitioners in the development of distributed virtual environment systems, both coming from the VR and the networking / distributed computing communities. In addition we address participants with practical experience in deploying a distributed virtual environment system.
Organizers
The workshop is organized by Gregor Schiele, Shun-Yun Hu, Arno Wacker, and Wei Tsang Ooi.
Dr. Gregor Schiele is a senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Mannheim. He received his M.Sc. and doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Stuttgart, Germany. His research interests include distributed virtual environments, peer-to-peer systems, and pervasive contextaware computing. Currently he is the lead coordinator of the peers@play project (http://www.peers-at-play.org), involving the Universities of Mannheim, Duisburg-Essen, and Hannover. The goal of the peers@play project is the development of a peer-to-peer-based middleware system for massively multiuser and highly scalable virtual environments.
Shun-Yun Hu is a Ph.D student at National Central University, Taiwan. He received his M.Eng. degree in computer science and information engineering from Tamkang University. His main research interests are networked virtual environments and peer-to-peer systems. He started the SourceForge project VAST (http://vast.sourceforge.net) in 2005 to provide an open source library for creating scalable peer-to-peer-based virtual environments.
Dr. Arno Wacker is a senior researcher and lecturer with the University of Duisburg. He received his M.Sc. and doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Stuttgart. His current research focuses on peer-to-peer systems with a high security requirement e.g. massively multiplayer virtual environments. In this application field decentralized authentication, accounting billing, as well as anti-cheating are interesting research questions. Furthermore, he is the local coordinator of the peers@play project in Duisburg.
Prof. Dr. Wei Tsang Ooi obtained his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in 2001 and worked as a postdoc at University of California, Berkeley, before joining National University of Singapore in 2002 as an Assistant Professor. His research interest is in distributed multimedia systems. In recently years, he has been actively involved in measurement studies of distributed virtual environment and design of protocols and techniques for streaming large 3D objects.
Conclusion
To sum up, MMVE 2009 brings together researchers and practitioners from the areas of virtual reality and distributed systems to discuss the next generation of massively multiuser virtual environments. We expect lively discussions based on the presented papers and will come with a list of current and future research topics.