Multimedia Immersive Technologies and Networking

Call for Papers

In recent years, different research communities developed methodologies and tools for capturing, processing, analyzing, transmitting, and enabling the remote fruition of objects, environments, and bioentities. Terms like immersive telecommunications are typically used for specifying this body of activities. Applications of immersive telecommunications technologies can be various, and include industrial automation, health care, education, and entertainment.

Over the last two decades, mostly the traditional multimedia research field (2D digital video and audio) has received the attention from both the networking and the multimedia communities. Thanks to their joint work, a wide range of tools and supports were developed, enabling the commercial world-wide deployment of multimedia-based services and products. All the related research and standardization activities enabled multimedia data to be adapted to different networking technologies, wired and wireless, established and emerging, with different and time-varying channel conditions. Also the restrictions due to the terminal processing power of handheld devices are on the way to be successfully overcome.

On the other hand, computer graphics, computer vision, and virtual/augmented reality communities have often developed conceptual models and tools working separately, mainly for fulfilling local and specific needs of predefined contexts. For instance, computer vision has often aimed at performing specific tasks (e.g., tracking, object recognition) in some specific scenarios (e.g., providing localization and visualization for robotic application or video surveillance). Computer graphics has developed a set of tools, such as rendering and texturing, which have been mainly applied to animation and games and, more in general, in the entertainment industry, mainly aiming to a local use, though forms of remote collaborative environment (such as 3D gaming) are starting to take off the ground. Similar approaches have been followed so far by virtual/augmented reality research community.

This special issue intends to bridge the traditional gap existing between immersive technologies and networking, focusing on how traditional and emerging fields (e.g., pervasive computing) can be brought together under the networking umbrella. Submissions presenting mature approaches as well as early and potentially disruptive research having a solid theoretical foundation are both encouraged. Topics of interest cover all phases of immersive telecommunications including, but not limited to:

Authors should follow the Advances in Multimedia manuscript format described at the journal site http://www.hindawi.com/journals/am/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/, according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Due	March 1, 2008
First Round of Reviews	June 1, 2008
Publication Date	September 1, 2008

Guest Editors:

• Ghassan Alregib, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0250, USA
• Mohammed Ghanbari, Department of Computing and Electronic Systems, University of Essex, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK
• Athanasios Vasilakos, Department of Computer and Telecommunications Engineering, University of Western Macedonia, 50100 Kozani, Greece
• Feng Wu, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing 100080, China
• Cha Zhang, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA 98052, USA