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Upcoming Conferences & CFPs

Upcoming Conferences & CFPs

ReLIVE08
The Open University is pleased to announce an international conference for Researching Learning in Virtual Environments to be held at its campus in Milton Keynes on the 20th and 21st of November 2008.
This conference will be of interest to anyone researching learning and teaching in virtual world environments such as Second Life.
The conference organisers are keen to construct a programme that features diverse and innovative research approaches to learning and teaching in virtual worlds. Given the emerging practice associated with virtual worlds, the conference committee are also keen to receive papers reporting on the experience of learning and teaching using virtual worlds that relate practice and outcomes to literature and research in this area. We anticipate that submissions will reflect a range of research methods and will examine issues such as rigour, methods of sampling, relationships between researchers and researched, and the ethics and politics of the research process.
Our keynote speaker is Edward Castranova, Associate Professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr Castranova is an expert on the economies of large-scale online games and has published extensively on the topic, including his most recent book Exodus to the Virtual World.

ACM SIGGRAPH Sandbox Symposium 08
Call for Participation
The third annual ACM SIGGRAPH Sandbox Symposium on videogames calls for papers, panel proposals, and presentations. We are looking for work that describes or illustrates innovative research in videogame theory, practice, methodologies, and criticism. Video games are a singular technological medium, comparable in cultural impact to the telephone, television or the Internet. What are the creative, technological, and commercial challenges facing this medium today and in the future? How do we relate engaging stories and worlds that leverage advances in technology? What is the continuing impact of this medium on individuals and society?

We seek original papers from the creative and technical communities that develop videogames and from academic researchers who study videogames and relevant technologies and disciplines. We also invite proposals for panel discussions. Selected papers and panels will be those judged to be highly-relevant to the research community and having the greatest potential impact on the practice of videogame development. All papers should meet the standards of their respective disciplines and will be peer-reviewed.

3rd International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts
(DIMEA 2008) -10-12 September 2008, Athens, Greece
SPECIAL SESSION *** Mobile Mixed Reality Games ***
Submission Deadline: April 30, 2008

Mobile Mixed Reality games are games that are played in a physical environment augmented with virtual game artifacts. While former Mixed Reality applications were mainly stationary, advances in mobile computing and positioning technology have made this new type of games possible. Players wear mobile computers equipped with positioning technology, head-mounted displays, laptops, personal digital assistants, or mobile phones in order to play this kind of games.

Early prototypes such as ARQuake, Human Pacman, or NetAttack showed the technical feasibility but also the potentials of mobile Mixed Reality games. Players find it fascinating to play their own avatar, to physically move in the game world and to directly interact and compete with their co-players. The close integration of Mixed Reality games in the physical environment offers a new player experience that cannot be achieved with traditional computer or console games.

While the technology has matured since the first games in this field leading to Mixed Reality systems running on off-the-shelf computers and there are already some related commercial systems available such as Sony's Eye of Judgment, many issues related to the design, development and evaluation of mobile Mixed Reality games are still open and need to be further researched.

posted by Netwoman @ 12:28 PM