CFP - Extensible Virtual Worlds Workshop

CFP - Extensible Virtual Worlds Workshop March 29-April 2, 2010 - Venue: Second Life Organizers: IBM Academy of Technology and University of Arkansas http://vw.ddns.uark.edu/X10 WORKSHOP CONTEXT Today’s virtual worlds are mostly stand alone and not easily extended. This workshop will explore component technologies that can be leveraged to make a set of extensible virtual worlds. These extensible virtual worlds will need to be secure, easy to build, easy to create applications for, and easy to integrate with the physical world and with enterprise IT systems. Several technologies are poised to contribute including gaming, geographic information systems, Web technologies, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, database management, cloud computing, service oriented architectures and others. This workshop aims to bring together knowledgeable international researchers and virtual world developers from areas that can contribute to accelerating our understanding of 3D virtual world architectures aimed at understanding the kinds of extensible 3D virtual world platforms that will be needed in the next five years to construct a rich variety of applications that 3D virtual worlds can make possible. THEMES/TOPICS Example themes for position papers could include: terminology, requirements, examples, driving or killer apps, potential for standards, and research challenges. o Theme 1: Extensible Virtual World Architectures - Extensible Architecture – Services, plugins, mix-and-match – subtracting or adding features. Evolution as new capabilities are added. - Scaling Virtual Worlds – Many prims, many avatars, … a hospital full of equipment, a stadium full of people, Second Earth, … tiny, cosmic. Connecting enclaves that have different properties. - Populating and Provisioning Virtual Worlds – how can we rapidly populate a large space by importing (or generating) terrain, buildings, and objects? What GIS, CAD, and other standards should we build on? How can we engage the community? o Theme 2: Virtual World Applications - Driving Applications – Modeling Healthcare, Retail, Battlefields, Real Estate, Museums, Archaeology Sites, etc - VW Enterprise Apps or games – How to layer them onto the core virtual world architecture - Planning and Workflows – How to organize a collection of avatar bots to cooperate to solve a problem in a virtual world - Economies – Modeling and trading systems in virtual worlds. Integrating with real world currency systems. o Theme 3: Integration with the Real World - Mirror Worlds – Tying the real and virtual world together. Using virtual world as a command post. Rural telemedicine. Modeling supply chains. Sensor networks and RFID. - Smart Networked Objects – What protocols are needed to make an ordinary object smart and networked? Identity, messaging, API reflection, access control, virtual model. - Man-Machine Interface – how can people communicate with smart networked (real or virtual) objects or collections of them? o Theme 4: Enhanced Capabilities - VW Search Engines and Query Language – Spatial queries, temporal queries, etc - Ontologies – Adding ontologies to make virtual worlds semantic (by analogy to the semantic web) - Time – Modeling past and future using virtual worlds - Scoping – When are virtual worlds appropriate, when are other modeling technologies more appropriate, can these different modeling technologies interoperate? - Security – Alternatives to simple access control, digital rights, microlicensing, micropayments, - Grief/Fraud – Modeling systems and tools for identifying users creating grief/fraud in the virtual world. IMPORTANT DATES Suggestions for Additional Themes: 15 December 2009 Registration/Paper Submission*: 1 February 2010 Notification of Acceptance: 1 March 2010 Workshop Dates: 29 March - 2 April 2010 * short position papers and/or full research paper INSTRUCTIONS The workshop will take place the week of March 29-April 2, 2010 as a series of small group thematic discussions in Second Life at various SLURL venues to be announced (avatar registration required). Each small group discussion will focus on a theme and will last around 3 hours. A moderator will ask the group a set of questions (available beforehand) and a scribe (volunteer from the group) will record the meeting and summarize the discussion in a 2-3 page brief that will be posted on the workshop homepage soon after that discussion. To be invited to a session, you must write a 1-2 page position paper (single-spaced, include position paper title, your name(s), your avatar name (for registration), your contact information and affiliation, your time zone for planning purposes, your virtual world credentials/experience, and your views on some aspect of a topic – see Themes/Topics). You may write multiple position papers to be invited to different thematic discussions. Position papers will be posted on the workshop homepage. Tiny groups will be merged and big groups split to keep group size around 5-10 (some topics may be covered by more than one group). Accommodation will be made for longer research papers or presentations for those who want to present recent results to a mid-sized audience. These papers/presentations will be reviewed for relevance. Accepted papers/ presentations will be posted on the workshop homepage. During the workshop, a schedule will be posted on the workshop homepage - the speaker will present and attendance will be limited to around 50 avatars, first-come-first-served from among registered participants. Accommodation will also be made for additional themes or topics as suggested by participants – include a paragraph describing the scope of theme. Since this workshop is focused on virtual world architectures, we are limiting additional themes to that general area, not to also include general social networking or cultural issues that do not focus on architectural aspects. SECOND LIFE LOGISTICS The workshop will take place in Second Life, a 3D virtual world. To participate in the workshop, in addition to submitting a short or long paper, you will need to become (somewhat) proficient in using Second Life. To get started: [see workshop website for some suggestions]. More instructions to follow - if your short/long paper is accepted (notification date is 1 March 2010), we'll send you information on pre-workshop socials inworld where you can meet other workshop attendees and practice communicating. If you are presenting a long paper (using .ppt for a presentation), we will send you instructions related to uploading your presentation and we'll give you some time to practice presenting in the two weeks before the workshop.