-------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS The 3rd International Workshop on Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE 2010) at the 7th ACM International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2010) November 17, 2010 Taipei, Taiwan http://peers-at-play.org/MMVE10/ -------------------------------------------------------- Massively Multiuser Virtual Environment (MMVE) systems are spatial simulations that provide real-time human interactions among thousands to millions of concurrent users. MMVEs have experienced phenomenal growth in recent years in the form of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft and Lineage, and social communities such as Second Life and Hobbo Hotel. The technical aspect of designing, developing, and deploying them is highly interdisciplinary and involves experts from many domains, including graphics, networking, protocol and architecture designs. The MMVE workshop intends to provide a forum for both academic researchers and industry developers to investigate the architectural and system support for MMVEs. By gathering experts under one roof, we wish to discuss their findings, incite collaborations, and move the state of the art forward. Topics ------ The workshop seeks to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in the field, and encourages discussions based on the presented papers to identify current and future research topics. Some key and emerging issues we would especially like to solicit are: 1. The integration with casual, social networking systems. Recently there has been a surge of casual social games on social networking sites such as Facebook, with tens of millions of active users. While many of them are not yet real-time in nature, providing massive real-time interactions may only be a matter of time. How will such systems emerge or be designed? Additionally, many 3D chatrooms / instant messengers are now appearing (e.g., IMVU, Club Cooee, Game Xiu). While most interactions are limited as room-based small-group interactions, the total concurrent users may also reach critical sizes given their casual nature (e.g., IMVU has already over 1 million active accounts). How should such systems be supported and scale? 2. The adoption of parallelism to increase scale. Fast GPU and multi-core processors are now becoming common commodity. How will this hardware trend impact MMVE server-cluster design? And how should P2P approaches for MMVE take advantage of the increased power at client-side? Additionally, home set-top boxes with large local storage and broadband Internet connections are becoming household commodities, how will this trend impact the ways MMVEs be delivered (perhaps via content streaming) or architected? 3. Interoperable MMVE standards and protocols. As the market for virtual world increases and matures, efforts to provide interoperable user experience across multiple virtual environments have also intensified. For example, initiatives are ongoing to form IETF working groups on defining virtual world standard protocols (e.g., MMOX and VWRAP ). Part of any standard process is the identification of common features and requirements. What are the common features and requirements in MMVE that may be modeled and abstracted to facilitate such standardization effort? And are there working protocols that already exist in current systems? We would like to invite such experience sharing and discussions. The workshop thus will address the following issues: 1. Scalability: the ability to handle at least thousands of concurrent users, interacting via Internet. 2. Interactivity: how to provide responsive, near real time interactions despite latency and jitter. 3. Consistency: providing consistent views for users, despite the inherent delay in state updates. 4. Persistency: the ability to save and access the world states despite disconnections and failures. 5. Security and privacy: distributed algorithms that allow secure interactions and privacy guarantees. 6. Interoperability: integration of multiple systems or providers with common protocols or clients. 7. Bandwidth restricted (mobile) devices: the integration of mobile devices for nomadic systems. 8. Self-organizing architectures: load balancing and fault tolerance without manual configurations. 9. Content streaming: voice communication and 3D content streaming. 10. Implementation issues: novel approaches to effectively manage the complexity of development. Submission Guidelines ---------------------- Paper submissions must cover one of the topics listed above, or a closely- related one. Submitted papers should be at most 6 pages long 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. Submissions in PDF format must be submitted online through the workshop page at http://peers-at-play.org/MMVE10/ no later than August 30th, 2010. Accepted papers must be presented at the workshop. Accepted papers will appear in a special issue of the International Journal of Advanced Media and Communications (IJAMC). If you have any questions, please email us at mmve@peers-at-play.org. Important Dates --------------- Submission Deadline: September 13th, 2010 (extended) Acceptance Notification: October 4th, 2010 Camera Ready Version: October, 11th, 2010 Workshop Date: November, 19th, 2010 Organizers ---------- TPC Co-Chairs: * Shervin Shirmohammadi, University of Ottawa, Canada * Jeffrey Kesselman, Blue fang Games, USA Steering Committee: * Gregor Schiele, University of Mannheim, Germany * Shun-Yun Hu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan * Wei Tsang Ooi, National University of Singapore, Singapore * Arno Wacker, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Technical Program Committee --------------------------------------- Maha Abdallah, University of Paris VI, France Dewan T. Ahmed, University of Ottawa, Canada Christian Bouville, IRISA, France Romain Cavagna, University of Paris VI, France Kuan-Ta Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan Abdennour El Rhalibi, Liverpool John Moores University, UK Chris GauthierDickey, University of Denver, USA Carsten Griwodz, Simula Research, Norway Behnoosh Hariri, University of Ottawa, Canada Aaron Harwood, University of Melbourne, Australia Sebastian Holzapfel, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany Jehn-Ruey Jiang, National Central University, Taiwan Stephan Krause, University of Karlsruhe, Germany Jay Lorch, Microsoft Research, USA Pedro Morillo Tena, University of Valencia, Spain Jauvane C. Oliveira, LNCC, Brazil Peter Quax, Hasselt University, Belgium Laura Ricci, University of Pisa, Italy Simon Rieche, RWTH Aachen University, Germany Ingo Scholtes, University of Trier, Germany Gwendal Simon, TELECOM Bretagne, France Richard Suselbeck, Univ. Mannheim, Germany Shinichi Ueshima, Kansai University, Japan Matteo Varvello, Alcatel-Lucent (Holmdel, NJ), USA Shinya Yamamoto, Tokyo University of Science, Yamaguchi, Japan Knut-Helge Vik, Simula Research, Norway Suiping Zhou, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Roger Zimmermann, National University of Singapore, Singapore