-- Dr. Gregor Schiele Chair of Information Systems II University of Mannheim, Germany http://becker.bwl.uni-mannheim.de/9.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS The 1st International Workshop on Concepts of Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (CoMMVE) at the 16th ITG/GI Kommunikation in verteilten Systemen 2009 March 5th or 6th, 2009 Kassel, Germany http://www.peers-at-play.org/CoMMVE09/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Massively multiuser virtual environments (MMVEs) allow a large number of users all over the world to experience a shared virtual 3D world and to interact in it with each others. While commercial MMVEs like World of Warcraft, Second Life, or Sony Home already exist, there are still a large number of open issues and important research questions that must be addressed in order to realize truly massive environments, both in terms of the size of the environment as well as the number of its concurrent users. The ultimate goal of this development is a worldwide system that spans whole virtual planets with many millions of users. To achieve this, systems must be developed that are - at the same time - extremely scalable, highly interactive, secure and reliable. They must support a consistent view of the environment for all users. Updates to the environment, both its infrastructure as well as its content, must be applied at runtime. The operation and further development of systems must be cost-effective and profitable, thus stimulating investment in them. Existing MMVEs are based on mostly static, fixed infrastructures, in which predefined server clusters are preassigned to different functions for operating the MMVE. Such systems are currently able to support thousands of concurrent users. This requires the system's operator to provide all necessary resources, like compute power, memory and network bandwidth. To become truly massive, future systems must be made much more flexible and must build on self-organising, adaptive systems. One promising approach is the use of peer-to-peer architectures, because a substatial amount of the necessary hardware resources are contributed by the users themselves. Thus the amount of resources in the system grows with the number of users. While peer-to-peer technology is already being used sucessfully today in many applications, e.g. for Internet telephony and the distribution of software updates, its applicability in highly interactive and distributed virtual 3D environments is still challenging and comprises numerous research and engineering challenges. The goal of this workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners in the area of MMVEs under one roof to discuss their findings, identify future research areas, incite collaborations, and move the state of the art forward. Topics ------ The workshop addresses the following topics related to building, operating, and using MMVEs: 1. Basic networking support, e.g. peer to peer networking for MMVEs, 2. MMVE hosting and software as a service (SAAS), 3. Bandwidth restricted (mobile) end user devices, 4. Self-organization and adaptation, 5. Placement and relocation strategies, 6. Scalability, 7. Interactivity, 8. Consistency, 9. Reliability and persistency, 10. Security and privacy, 11. Interoperability and integration of virtual environments, 12. User generated content, 13. Updating and content streaming, e.g. 3D streaming, 14. Evaluations and case studies of existing systems, 15. Development support and middleware platforms. Submission Guidelines ---------------------- 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. Submitted papers should be about 10-12 pages long, use the ECEASST format and must be blinded (see the workshop web page for more info). Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere. All submissions will be peer-reviewed (double blind) and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop. All accepted papers must be presented at the workshop and will be published in the Open-Access Journal "Electronic Communications of the EASST" (ECEASST) (http://eceasst.cs.tu-berlin.de/index.php/eceasst). If you have any questions, please email us at commve@peers-at-play.org. Important Dates --------------- Submission Deadline: October 31, 2008 Acceptance Notification: November 30, 2008 Camera Ready Version: December 27, 2008 Workshop Date: March 5 or 6, 2009 Organizers ---------- * Gregor Schiele, University of Mannheim, Germany * Arno Wacker, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany * Jörg Hähner, University of Hannover, Germany Preliminary Program Committee ----------------- * Christian Becker, Uni Mannheim, Germany * Sonja Buchegger, Deutsche Telekom Labs, Germany * Georg Carle, Uni Tübingen, Germany * Wolfgang Effelsberg, Uni Mannheim, Germany * Shun-Yun Hu, National Central University, Taiwan * Aleksandra Kovacevic, TU Darmstadt, Germany * Martin Mauve, Uni Düsseldorf, Germany * Kurt Rothermel, Uni Stuttgart, Germany * Jérôme Royan, Orange Labs, France * Jochen Schiller, FU Berlin, Germany * Peter Sturm, Uni Trier, Germany * Pedro Morillo Tena, University of Valencia, Spain * Klaus Wehrle, RWTH Aachen, Germany * Torben Weis, Uni Duisburg-Essen, Germany * Daniel Weiskopf, Uni Stuttgart, Germany * Oliver Wellnitz, TU Braunschweig, Germany