D3.3_5 4th INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP (event report and proceedings)

[IreneMantzouranis]

INTUITION is currently the biggest initiative in the European VR research and industrial community. Along with its research goals the Network aims to spread excellence beyond its members and also to establish contacts with other VR players in Europe that have not been part of the Network or its Forum. Within this scope INTUITION has established its series of workshops. These workshops have not only grown to be annual events for the INTUITION Community but one of the most important Workshops on VR-related topics in Europe.
The first step of the Workshop series was conducted in Athens on September 2004 along with the kick-off meeting of the Network. The success of this workshop – taking also into account the short preparation time and the fact that INTUITION was just born those days- gave the organisers both the opportunity to achieve successful 2nd and 3rd Workshops and the challenge to turn it into a European Conference on Virtual Reality and Virtual Environments with a strong scientific participation.
Within INTUITION initially three Workshops were planned. The first one (year 1 workshop) was scheduled between month 12 and month 18 in France, the second in Paris November 24th-25th, 2005, the third on November 30th and December 1st in Stuttgart Germany. However the success of the initially planned Workshops in terms of participation and outcomes leaded to the organisation of the 4th Conference in Athens, Greece on October 3rd-5th,2007 and the decision to conduct the 5th one at the end of the project in Torino, Italy (October 6th-8th,2008).
The strategy behind the workshop series is:
o 1st Workshop: establish the necessary Workshop mass and make INTUITION known to a more general basis.
o 2nd Workshop: present the current status of VR R&D in Europe, expectancies of current VR users, new applications;
o 3rd Workshop: present scientific excellence achieved within Europe’s research activities;
o 4th Conference and Workshop: present VR enhancement in various application domains through not only invited contributions but also an open call for participation to enhance the scientific validity of the Conference;
o 5th Conference and Workshop: present VR applications with particular devotion to industrial applications and establish the INTUITION Conference as a major European Conference on Virtual Reality and Virtual Environments.
The Intuition Workshop has become a well known event not only among the European VR/AR community but has also attracted international interest featuring a rich exhibition with strong industrial participation and valuable invited contributions. As such the time had come to raise the importance of the Workshop’s scientific role and establish it as a European VR/AR Conference with an open call for participation (papers, posters, tutorials, and exhibition) and a peer-review procedure by a highly accredited scientific committee.
Emphasis has been put on scientific research and application outcomes in a wide area, ranging from human factors issues to hardware set-ups and from simulation techniques to application areas such as entertainment
The Workshop was organised by an Organising committee consisting of representatives both from Greek organisations members of the Consortium but also from previous Workshop organisers. This year because of the open call for participation an International Programme Committee was formed to manage the scientific programme while the peer review process was undertaken by a Scientific Committee. The Workshop was organised in parallel paper sessions, accompanied with a poster session, a panel, an exhibition and two tutorials.