MMVE 2017 - 9th International Workshop on Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments

Virtual Environment systems are spatial simulations that provide real-time human interactions with other users or a simulated virtual world. Virtual environments have experienced phenomenal growth in recent years in the form of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft and Lineage, and social communities such as Second Life and Habbo Hotel. Virtual environments are also considered a central building block in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality systems, especially for multi user systems. They are also examined in areas like the Internet of Things or Cyber Physical Systems to act as a common information space that can be used e.g. by smart devices to interact with each other.
The technical aspect of designing, developing, and deploying them is highly interdisciplinary and involves experts from many domains, e.g., graphics, networking, and architecture designs. The MMVE workshop intends to provide a forum for both academic researchers and industry developers to investigate the architectural and system support for virtual environments. By gathering experts under one roof, we wish to discuss their findings, incite collaborations, and move the state of the art forward.
The workshop seeks to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in the field, and will encourage discussions based on the presented papers to identify current and future research topics.
Scope
As an intended focal point of discussion, we particularly solicit contributions related to the various challenges that recent advances in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) pose to MMVE systems and architectures.
Further topics of interests include:
Scalability, the ability to handle at a large number of concurrent users, and or devices, interacting via Internet.
Interactivity, how to provide responsive, near real time interactions and user experience despite latency or jitter.
Consistency, providing consistent views for users, despite the inherent delay in state updates.
Persistence, the ability to save and access the world states despite disconnections and failures.
Security and privacy, distributed algorithms allowing secure interactions and privacy guarantees.
Interoperability, integration of multiple systems or providers with common protocols or clients.
Bandwidth restriction, the integration of mobile devices for nomadic systems.
Self-Organisation, e.g. load balancing and fault tolerance without manual configurations.
Video, voice and content streaming, also in (mixed) 3D, remote presence, incremental deployment and updating.
Content generation methods, procedural or by users.
Implementation issues, novel approaches to address development challenges, including sociological aspects.