MMVE 2008

 
The 1st International Workshop on Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments at IEEE Virtual Reality 2008
March 8th, 2008, Reno, Nevada, USA

[ News | Introduction | Schedule | Call for Papers | Important Dates | Organizers | Committee | IEEE VR ]

News

MMVE'08 is over - Slides & Pictures Available
The workshop event has passed. We had a great time with very interesting talks and discussions. Slides for all talks given at the workshop are available in the workshop schedule section (see here). You can find pictures from the workshop here.

Workshop Schedule
The workshop schedule is now online (see here) and the MMVE08 Proceedings can be downloaded here.

Special Issue
The workshop results and selected papers will be published as a special issue (topic: MMVEs) of the International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication (IJAMC).

Deadline Extension
The deadline for submitting papers to MMVE08 has been extended to January 26th.

Keynote by Jon Watte
Jon Watte will give a keynote at the workshop, in which he'll describe some surprising places virtual worlds have been adopted; what the future looks like; and some sketches for open research areas.
In addition to his job as CTO of serious virtual world platform company Forterra Systems, Jon is a regular contributor to the independent game development community. A Microsoft DirectX/XNA MVP and moderator of the Multiplayer and Networking forum on independent games site GameDev.Net, Jon has several published articles in the field and has spoken on the future direction of the interoperable 3D web on several occasions. He combines practical experience with solid theoretical underpinnings to bring success to the field of massive-scale, interactive distributed simulation. Prior to heading up Forterra Systems, Jon worked on products such as There.com, BeOS, and Metrowerks CodeWarrior.
 

Introduction

With the increasing number of potential users of virtual and augmented reality systems, as indicated by the recent booming of massively multiuser online societies, the design of distributed, massively multiuser virtual environments (MMVEs) 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. 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 Schedule

8:30-9:30Welcome & keynote
Session Chair: Gregor Schiele, University of Mannheim, Germany
    Getting There from Here: A Roadmap For the Interoperable 3D Internet (slides)
    by Jon Watte, CTO, Forterra Systems
9:30-10:00Coffee break
10:00-12:00Session 1
Session Chair: Arno Wacker, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
  1. Scalable Reputation Management for P2P MMOGs (paper)(slides)
    by Guan-Yu Huang, Shun-Yun Hu, Jehn-Ruey Jiang
  2. Clustering Players for Load Balancing in Virtual Worlds (paper)(slides)
    by Simon Rieche, Klaus Wehrle, Marc Fouquet, Heiko Niedermayer, Timo Teifel, Georg Carle
  3. Consistency Management for Peer-to-Peer-based Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (paper)(slides)
    by Gregor Schiele, Richard Sueselbeck, Arno Wacker, Tonio Triebel, Christian Becker
  4. Data Aggregation Method for View Range Computation on P2P-based VCS (paper)(slides)
    by Ryo Nishide, Dai Ito, Masaaki Ohnishi, Shinichi Ueshima
12:00-13:30Lunch
13:30-15:30Session 2
Session Chair: Shun-Yun Hu, National Central University, Taiwan
  1. An Implementation of a First-Person Game on a Hybrid Network (paper)(slides)
    by Anthony Steed, Bingshu Zhu
  2. Solipsis: A Decentralized Architecture for Virtual Environments (paper)(slides)
    by Davide Frey, J�r�me Royan, Romain Piegay, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Emmanuelle Anceaume, Fabrice Le Fessant
  3. The HyperVerse - Concepts for a Federated and Torrent Based "3D Web" (paper)(slides)
    by Jean Botev, Markus Esch, Alexander H�hfeld, Hermann Schloss, Ingo Scholtes
  4. Towards an Authentication Service for Peer-to-Peer based Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (paper)(slides)
    by Arno Wacker, Gregor Schiele, Sebastian Schuster, Torben Weis
15:30-16:00Coffee break
16:00-17:00Open panel discussion
    Peer-to-peer MMVEs - future or fashion?
 

Call for Papers

The workshop addresses the following topics:
  1. Scalability, i.e. the ability to handle thousands of users at the same time, interacting via the global Internet.
  2. Interactivity, i.e. how to provide highly responsive environments with near real time interaction despite network delay and jitter.
  3. Bandwidth restricted (mobile) end user devices, e.g. the integration of mobile devices for nomadic augmented reality applications.
  4. Dynamic & flexible distribution architectures, e.g. self-adapting client/server, peer-to-peer and hybrid architectures.
  5. Consistency, i.e. providing guarantees concerning consistency to users of the distributed environment, despite the high level of responsiveness necessary and the experienced network delay.
  6. Persistency, i.e. the ability to save and access the state of the virtual environment despite disconnections and faulty components.
  7. Security & privacy, e.g. distributed authentication algorithms that allow users to participate in the environment securely and without fear of being spied on.
  8. Implementation issues, e.g. novel approaches to effectively manage the complexity of developing applications for such environments.

In order to ensure a high quality technical session, 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. The workshop will provide a meeting point for researchers working in the field. We plan to encourage discussions based on the presented papers and come with a list of requirements for next generation distribution middleware.

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.
 

Submission Guidelines

Submitted papers should be about 5 pages long, use the IEEE proceedings format and must be blinded. 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.

Paper submission is closed.

Accepted papers must be presented at the workshop. Selected papers will appear in a special issue of the International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication (IJAMC), subject to addressing all reviewer comments from MMVE and reformatting according to IJAMC formatting guidelines. If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].

 

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: January 16th, 2008 January 26th, 2008 (extended)
Acceptance Notification: January 23rd, 2008 February 10th, 2008
Camera Ready Version: January 30th, 2008 February 17th, 2008
Workshop Date: March 8, 2008
 

Organizers

 

Technical Program Committee