During the last decade the word virtual became one of the most exposed words in the English language. Today we have virtual universities, virtual offices, virtual pets, virtual actors, virtual museums, virtual doctors - and all because of virtual reality. So what is virtual reality? Essentially, virtual reality is about the navigation and manipulation of 3D computer-generated environments. A VR user is able to navigate by walking, running or even flying through a virtual environment and explore viewpoints that would be impossible in the real world. But the real benefit of VR is the ability to touch, animate, pickup and reposition virtual objects and create totally new configurations. Key topics: The origins of VR How VR works How VR is being used The field of Virtual Reality is moving very quickly and increasing numbers of people need to know more about this exciting subject. Introduction to Virtual Reality explains what VR is about, without going into the underlying mathematical techniques, but at the same time providing a solid understanding and foundation of the techniques and applications involved.

In September 2001, we organized the 1st International Conference on Virtual Sto- telling in Avignon, France. This was the ?rst international scienti?c event entirely - voted to the new discipline that links the ancient human art of storytelling to the latest high technologies of the Virtual Reality era. Since this date, technology has not slowed its course. We all know that personal computers are even more powerful, but there have been huge advances in graphics boards.These arenowprogrammableandcan renderin realtime hugequantitiesof data as well as special effectsthat until recently requireda dedicatedgraphicssuperworks- tion. Applications that were in the research lab have now come to market. 3D Virtual Humans, the heroes of today's video games, are taking their ?rst steps on e-business Web sites. These will be the stars of tomorrow. New topics are being intensively - searched, especially, mixed and enhanced realities - the art of combining synthesized with real worlds. This evolution raises many technical, applicational, artistic and even ethical qu- tions.Theoccasionofthe2ndInternationalConferenceonVirtualStorytellingprovided an excellentopportunityto onceagaingatherresearchersfromthe scienti?c, artistic and industrialcommunitiestodemonstratenewmethodsandtechniques.Thiswasthevenue to show the latest results, and exchange concepts and ideas about the use of Virtual - ality technologiesfor creating, populating, renderingand interactingwith stories, wh- ever their form, be it theatre, movie, cartoon, advertisement, puppet show, multimedia work, video games, etc.

The Advanced Game Narrative Toolbox continues where the Game Narrative Toolbox ended. While the later covered the basics of writing for games, the Advanced Game Narrative Toolbox will cover techniques for the intermediate and professional writer. The book will cover topics such as how to adapt a novel to a game, how to revive IPs and how to construct transmedia worlds. Each chapter will be written by a professional with exceptional experience in the field of the chapter. Key Features Learn from industry experts how to tackle today's challenges in storytelling for games. A learn by example and exercise approach, which was praised in the Game Narrative Toolbox. An in depth view on advanced storytelling techniques and topics as they are currently discussed and used in the gaming industry. Expand your knowledge in game writing as you learn and try yourself to design quests, write romances and build worlds as you would as a writer in a game studio. Improve your own stories by learning and trying the techniques used by the professionals of game writing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2001, held in Madrid, Spain in September 2001.The 16 revised full papers and five short papers presented together with two invited surveys were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are intelligent agents in education, virtual human societies, virtual agents, animation systems, autonomous avatars, the virtual self, agent societies, Internet agents, mobile agents, collaborative virtual environments, virtual storytelling, interactive improvisational plays, agent-oriented simulation, and 3D agents.

This book focuseson the use of computer visionand graphics in architecture. It arose from a convergenceof several hot topics: 1. visualization of built environments for engineering, historical and other purposes, 2. virtual reconstruction of architecture from visual data of existing struc tures, whether via photogrammetric or range sensing techniques, and 3. augmentation of video data of architecture with useful information. The focus here is on architecture and howto present it, enhance it's abilities, make it easier to understand and make it accessibleto a larger public. Collective interest in this topic led to the International Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Architecture, whose papers are contained in this book. As editors, we were very pleased about how well the different papers chosen gavea nice focus to the topic and conference.It is clear that there are many different research approaches still active in this area - this makes it an exciting time. Wehope that this book captures that excitement and succeeds in bringing it to you.

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of collaborative virtual environments. It tells you all you need to know about the latest technology, state-of-the-art research, and good working practice.The issues raised include: - what is a CVE? - what are the issues in the design of embodiments and objects within CVEs? - how can CVEs support collocated and non-collocated collaborative and cooperative work? - what are the best ways to provide awareness of the actions of others? - how can they support seamless interactions given differential computational resources? - what design issues arise from the meeting of social requirements and computational limitations? - what technical challenges face the designers of CVE systems?It will be invaluable reading for anyone with an interest in collaboration but will be of particular interest to researchers and students in areas related to computer supported cooperative and collaborative work and human computer interaction.

Virtual reality technology has been developed commercially since the early 1990s but it is only recently, with the popularity of the internet, that it has become feasible to link many users simultaneously in shared virtual environments. This raises a number of interesting questions such as: what is the difference between face-to-face and avatar-to-avatar interaction? What patterns govern the formation of virtual communities? How does the appearance of the avatar change the nature of the communication? There has been much speculation about issues such as these but research is still at a relatively early stage. This is the first book to bring together work from relevant disciplines to form a reference guide for practitioners, students and researchers interested in how we interact in computer-generated environments. It contains contributions from most of the key people in this area (including Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group) and presents their findings in a way which is accessible to readers who are new to this field or who come from related areas. It is divided into 2 parts; chapters 2-6 deal with internet-based virtual worlds which have been widely used by the public; chapters 7-10 deal with networked VR systems which have been primarily used in pilot studies and research. Some chapters take the viewpoint of a participant observer, whilst others take a more experimental approach and assess the results of relevant trials. This book will be essential reading for anyone involved in developing, using or researching virtual worlds, and will also be of interest to students on courses such as VR and Computer-mediated communication.

This book contains the proceedings of the sixth Eurographics Workshop on Vir tual Environments. The event took place from June 1 to June 2, 2000, in Am sterdam. We hope that readers will find these proceedings to be valuable, not only for virtual environment researchers, but also for practitioners developing or using virtual environment applications. We are glad to report that visibility of the workshop continues to expand and that virtual environment researchers and practitioners from allover the world are submitting papers. This year, 40 papers and case studies were submitted of which 20 were accepted. In addition, we are glad to see that the focus of the workshop is also expanding. We accepted 6 research papers on evaluation of virtual environments and there was a broad sampling of other topics. We would like to thank all those involved in organizing the symposium. In particular, thanks go to Mieke Brune who was in charge of the local organization. In addition, we want to thank the international program committee for their excellent, yet laborious, job in reviewing all submitted papers. The quality of the workshop is a reflection of the quality of the submitted papers and the quality of the reviewing process.

Understanding Virtual Design Studios examines the issues involved in setting up and running a virtual design studio. Rather than focusing on the technology or how to apply it, the reader is presented with an interdisciplinary framework for understanding, organising, running and improving virtual design studios both in professional and educational practice. The authors assess the potential benefits, such as improved creativity and collaboration, and highlight the areas in which our understanding needs to improve:
How people collaborate in an environment where interaction is mediated by shared computer resources
How to organise and manage a distributed workspace efficiently
How people represent and communicate design ideas in an electronic form
Of interest to both design professionals and researchers interested in computer-mediated collaboration, this volume will also be of interest to anyone who needs a clear picture of what this new technology can do for them.

This book contains the scientific papers presented at the SthEUROGRAPHICS Workshop on Virtual Environments '99, which st st was held in Vienna May 31 and June 1 . It was organized by the Institute of Computer Graphics of the Vienna University of Technology together with the Austrian Academy of Sciences and EUROGRAPHICS. The workshop brought together scientists from all over the world to present and discuss the latest scientific advances in the field of Virtual Environments. 31 papers where submitted for reviewing and 18 where selected to be presented at the workshop. Most of the top research institutions working in the area submitted papers and presented their latest results. These presentations were complemented by invited lectures from Stephen Feiner and Ron Azuma, two key researchers in the area of Augmented Reality. The book gives a good overview of the state of the art in Augmented Reality and Virtual Environment research. The special focus of the Workshop was Augmented Reality, reflecting a noticeable strong trend in the field of Virtual Environments. Augmented Reality tries to enrich real environments with virtual objects rather than replacing the real world with a virtual world. The main challenges include real time rendering, tracking, registration and occlusion of real and virtual objects, shading and lighting interaction, and interaction techniques in augmented environments. These problems are addressed by new research results documented in this book. Besides Augmented Reality, the papers collected here also address levels of detail, distributed environments, systems and applications, and interaction techniques.

Virtual Realism is an art form and a way of living with technology. To explain it, Michael Heim draws on a hypertext of topics, from answering machines to interactive art, from engineering to television programs, from the meaning of UFOs to the Internet. The book begins with the primer "VR 101". The issues are discussed, then several chapters illustrate virtual realism with tours through art exhibits and engineering projects. Each chapter suggests a harmony of technology with lifestyle.

In this volume, John Vince provides a history of virtual reality (VR) and explains in easy-to-understand terms what computer graphics are and how they are integral to VR systems. He explains how important it is to understand the role human factors play in creating a good VR system, such as sound, sight, touch and balance. He also provides a detailed look at a working VR system and answers such questions as:
* What hardware and software is used?
* How does multi-user VR work?
* Can you network VR?
* What are the applications?
* What is the future for VR?

1 Introduction Imagine a virtual world with digital creatures that looks like real life, sounds like real life, and even feels like real life. Imagine a virtual world not only with nice three dimensional graphics and animations, but also with realistic physical laws and forces. This virtual world could be familiar, reproducing some parts of our reality, or unfa miliar, with strange "physical" laws and artificial life forms. As a researcher interested in the sciences of complexity, the idea of a conference about virtual worlds emerged from frustration. In the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in the design of artificial environments using image synthesis and virtual reality. The emergence of industry standards such as VRML [1] is an illustra tion of this growing interest. At the same time, the field of Artificial Life has ad dressed and modeled complex phenomena such as self organization, reproduction, development, and evolution of artificial life like systems [2]. One of the most popular works in this field has been Tierra designed by Tom Ray: an environment producing synthetic organisms based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the "energy" resource and memory is the "material" resource [3]. Memory is or ganized into informational patterns that exploit CPU time for self replication. Muta tion generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different creatures compete for CPU time and memory space.

This volume is the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Advanced Multimedia Content Processing (AMCP 98). With the remarkable advances made in computer and communication hardware/software system technologies, we can now easily obtain large volumes of multimedia data through advanced computer networks and store and handle them in our own personal hardware. Sophisticated and integrated multimedia content processing technologies, which are essential to building a highly advanced information based society, are attracting ever increasing attention in various service areas, including broadcasting, publishing, medical treatment, entertainment, and communications. The prime concerns of these technologies are how to acquire multimedia content data from the real world, how to automatically organize and store these obtained data in databases for sharing and reuse, and how to generate and create new, attractive multimedia content using the stored data. This conference brings together researchers and practitioners from academia, in dustry, and public agencies to present and discuss recent advances in the acquisition, management, retrieval, creation, and utilization of large amounts of multimedia con tent. Artistic and innovative applications through the active use of multimedia con tent are also subjects of interest. The conference aims at covering the following par ticular areas: (1) Dynamic multimedia data modeling and intelligent structuring of content based on active, bottom up, and self organized strategies. (2) Access archi tecture, querying facilities, and distribution mechanisms for multimedia content."

Ten years after Virtual Environment research started with NASA s VIEW project, these techniques are now exploited in industry to speed up product development cycles, to ensure higher product quality, and to encourage early training on and for new products. Especially the automotive industry, but also the oil and gas industry are driving the use of these techniques in their works. The papers in this volume reflect all the different tracks of the workshop: reviewed technical papers as research contributions, summaries on panels of VE applications in the automotive, the medical, the telecommunication and the geoscience field, a panel discussing VEs as the future workspace, invited papers from experts reporting from VEs for entertainment industry, for media arts, for supercomputing and productivity enhancement. Short industrial case studies, reporting very briefly from ongoing industrial activities complete this state of the art snapshot."

The worlds synthesized in the cyberspaces of networked computers are the theme of Cyberworlds. Cyberspaces have come into prominence with the de velopment of the Internet and are expected to expand drastically with the emergence of national and international information systems. The purpose is to discover the architecture and design of cy of the book Cyberworlds berworlds by synthesizing worlds in cyberspaces. The underlying philosophy is crucial to the success of the architecture, and an initial effort is made to delineate it at the beginning of the book. The book's topics are selected to clarify the issues of the philosophy, architecture, and design of cyberworlds through a wide variety of case studies. The approach presented in the book is thus characterized as synthetic rather than analytic. There already are numbers of books with observations and analyses of cyberworlds. They warn of the danger of widespread crimes and accidents in the cyberworlds, for instance. Without a philosophy and methodologies of how to architecturally design and synthesize the cyber worlds, the worlds in cyberspaces tend to be arbitrarily extended, disordered, and, in extreme cases, criminal. This book is intended to benefit readers by providing them with a possible direction to take in deciding how to synthesize worlds in cyberspaces. Cre ating new worlds in new spaces with almost unlimited dimension and scale is an immense challenge. In principle, anyone at any moment can participate in the creation. The book serves as a creator's reference and also as a design guidebook."

The Advanced Game Narrative Toolbox continues where the Game Narrative Toolbox ended. While the later covered the basics of writing for games, the Advanced Game Narrative Toolbox will cover techniques for the intermediate and professional writer. The book will cover topics such as how to adapt a novel to a game, how to revive IPs and how to construct transmedia worlds. Each chapter will be written by a professional with exceptional experience in the field of the chapter. Key Features Learn from industry experts how to tackle today's challenges in storytelling for games. A learn by example and exercise approach, which was praised in the Game Narrative Toolbox. An in depth view on advanced storytelling techniques and topics as they are currently discussed and used in the gaming industry. Expand your knowledge in game writing as you learn and try yourself to design quests, write romances and build worlds as you would as a writer in a game studio. Improve your own stories by learning and trying the techniques used by the professionals of game writing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Joint Conference; Computer Vision, Virtual Reality and Robotics in Medicine, CVRMed, and Medical Robotics and Computer-Assisted Surgery, MRCAS, held in Grenoble, France, in March 1997.
The volume presents 76 regular revised papers and 16 clinical papers selected from a total of 161 submitted full papers. The volume offers highly innovative and promising research results in computer-assisted medicine and medical informatics. Among the areas covered are medical imaging, virtual reality, medical robotics, and computer-integrated therapy and surgery. The book is of relevance to clinicians, medical engineers, and computer scientists.

Progress in computer animation has gained such a speed that, before long, computer-generated human faces and figures on screen will be indistinguishable from those of real humans. The potential both for scripted films and real-time interaction with users is enormous. However, in order to cope with this potential, these faces and figures must be guided by autonomous personality agents. This carefully arranged volume presents the state of the art in research and development in making synthetic actors more autonomous. The papers describe the different approaches and solutions developed by computer animation specialists, computer scientists, experts in AI, psychologists and philosophers, from leading laboratories world-wide. Finally, a bibliography comprising more than 200 entries enable further study.

This comprehensive resource examines the rapidly-growing esports phenomenon in higher education, bringing the perspectives of players, administrators, and scholars together in one volume to discuss the basics of esports, how to start and maintain successful esports programs, and issues and trends in the field. Esports are a global phenomenon with an estimated audience of 400 million people in 2018. Given their already strong base and rising popularity on college campuses, esports have been referred to as the new college football. This book offers practical insights into how to develop and maintain an esports program that is consistent with institutional purposes and values. The book is helpful to all types of institutions (small to large, public and private, 2-year or 4-year). It draws on current scholarship and the professional experience of the authors, focused heavily on practical advice for higher education professionals. Among the challenges of esports in higher education the book addresses are competition structure, competition climate, child protection, cheating, gambling, lack of reliable relevant data to inform decisions, and the advent of an esports arms race. Some of the opportunities described in the book include student recruitment and success networks with high schools, and partnerships with the esports industry. Done correctly, esports can provide a structured way for all students (on campus, off campus, and online) to engage in both curricular and cocurricular programming that can provide measurable learning outcomes and have a positive impact on retention rates.

Selected papers from this year's Workshops on Virtual Environments and on Visualization in Scientific Computing are included in this volume. The papers on VE discuss Virtual Environment System architecture, communication requirements, synthetic actors, crowd simulations and modeling aspects, application experience in surgery support, geographic information systems, and engineering and virtual housing systems. Contributions from the Visualization workshop are presented in four groups: volume rendering, user interfaces in scientific visualization, architecture of scientific visualization systems and flow visualization.

Virtual Environments -(VE) the new dimension in man-machine-communication -have been developed and experienced in Europe since 1990. In early 1993 the Eurographics Association decided to establish a working group on Virtual Environments with the aim to communicate advances in this fascinating area on a scientific and technical level. In September 1993 the first workshop on VEs was held in Barcelona, Spain, in conjunction with the annual Eurographics conference. The workshop brought together about 35 researchers from Europe and the US. The second workshop was held together with Imagina '95 in Monte Carlo, Monaco. This time, around 40 researchers from Europe, the US, but also from Asia met for a 2-day exchange of experience. Needless to say -as in all Eurographics workshops -we found the atmosphere very open and refreshing. The workshops were sponsored by ONR (Office of Naval Research), UK; US Army Research Institute, UK; University of Catalonia, Spain; EDF France; CAE France, INA France and IGD Germany and locally organized by Daniele Tost and Jaques David. While in the first workshop in 1993 many concepts in VE were presented, the '95 workshop showed up various applications in different areas and demonstrated quite clearly that Virtual Environments are now used in interactive applications.

Visualization is nowadays indispensable to get insight into the huge amounts of data pro duced by large scale simulations or advanced measurement devices. The use of com puter graphics for scientific purposes has become a well established discipline, known as Scientific Visualization. Many problems still have to be solved, and hence the field is a very active area for research and development. This book represents results of the sixth in a well established series of international workshops on Visualization in Scien tific Computing organized by the EUROGRAPHICS Association in collaboration with CRS4 (Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia), held from May 3 to May 5,1995, in Chia, Italy. The thirteen contributions selected for this volume cover a wide range of topics, ranging from detailed algorithmic studies to searches for new metaphors. A rough di vision can be made into the parts interaction, irregular meshes, volume rendering, and applications. Interaction in three dimensions is a challenging area for research. The use of three dimensional user interfaces for more natural manipulation of three-dimensional data and their visualization is natural, but is far from trivial to realize. Pang et al. investigate the use of common objects such as spray cans and carving knives as metaphors for visualiza tion tools, in order to provide an intuitive and natural three dimensional user interface. Gibson uses a voxel-based data representation, not only for visualization, but also for physical modeling of objects. A prototype system under development for haptic explo ration is discussed."

This volume contains a thoroughly refereed collection of revised full papers selected from the presentations at the First East-West International Conference on Multimedia, Hypermedia, and Virtual Reality, MHVR'94, held in Moscow, Russia, in September 1994.
The 22 full papers presented in the book were selected from a total of 76 initial submissions and have been carefully updated for publication. Also included are two invited papers and summaries by the session chairpersons. The volume is organized in chapters on hypermedia models and architectures, enhancing multimedia support, new technologies for virtual reality, hypermedia and multimedia for group collaboration, hypermedia and multimedia for learning, and personalized hypermedia.

Superblack, superblock, supercase, superquadric, supersampling, superred, supergreen, and superblue are just a few of the words which make up the language of computer graphics. This new edition of a widely acclaimed dictionary provides a guide to this fast-moving subject for both relative novices and professionals working in the field. The main changes have been to add new terminology relating to virtual reality and the related topics of robotics and networked simulation. This dictionary covers the software, hardware, and applications of computer graphics and contains hundreds of terms not found elsewhere. Definitions are clear and concise, with special attention given to alternate spellings and meanings. Acronyms are decoded, and pronunciation of the seemingly unpronounceable is given, from WYSIWYG (whizzy-wig) to NAPLPS (nap-lips).