Immersive multimedia has been becoming a reality due to the recent development of Extended Reality (XR), which is an umbrella term for emulating a physical world in a virtual world leveraging various human senses. One driving force of such development is the appearance of consumer-grade Head-Mounted Display (HMD) and the immediate market of computer games. Immersive multimedia, however, has other novel applications in many domains, such as occupational training, healthcare, manufacturing, education, tourism, and real estate, to name a few. Adopting immersive multimedia in these novel applications is quite challenging from both technology and sociology perspectives, and thus requires interdisciplinary discussions. From the technology perspective, immersive multimedia dictates high bandwidth, short latency, and reliable transmission of media content, which can be better fulfilled with edge/cloud architectures and advanced networks. From the sociology perspective, the success of immersive multimedia depends on the human-computer interface, which is highly application-dependent.

This special issue of IEEE MultiMedia will offer a timely collection of research updates to benefit researchers and practitioners working in fields ranging from multimedia, networking, cloud computing, to human-computer interface. Through interdisciplinary discussions, the special issue would inform social researchers and business agencies, who increasingly gain access to immersive multimedia, with new disciplines to study all social phenomena. The social researchers and business agencies would then deploy novel immersive multimedia in the fields, which in turn builds up stronger momentum in this emerging research direction. Topics of interest include:

- Emerging applications of immersive multimedia, such as persistent virtual universe (Metaverse)
- Advances in wireless communication protocols for immersive multimedia
- Advances in networking protocols for immersive multimedia
- Advances in mobile techniques for immersive multimedia
- Advances in edge/cloud computing orchestration for immersive multimedia
- Advances in federated learning for immersive multimedia
- Advances in system engineering for immersive multimedia
- Novel designs of blockchain for immersive multimedia
- Novel designs of the human-computer interface for immersive multimedia
- Novel designs of AI for immersive multimedia
- Experience analysis for immersive multimedia
- Social behavior analysis in immersive multimedias

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
For author information on how to submit a manuscript, visit the Author Information page. Please submit your papers through the ScholarOne online system and be sure to select the special issue or special section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal. Abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly (mm4-22@computer.org).

CONTACT THE GUEST EDITORS AT:
mm4-22@computer.org


GUEST EDITORS:
Prof. Maha Abdallah, Sorbonne University, France
Prof. Prabhakaran Balakrishnan, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Prof. Wei Cai, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China
Prof. Cheng-Hsin Hsu, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan