CFP - Extensible Virtual Worlds Workshop
March 29-April 2, 2010 - Venue: Second Life
Organizers: IBM Academy of Technology and University of Arkansas
http://vw.ddns.uark.edu/X10

WORKSHOP CONTEXT

Today's virtual worlds are mostly stand alone and not easily extended.
This workshop will explore component technologies that can be leveraged
to make a set of extensible virtual worlds. These extensible virtual
worlds will need to be secure, easy to build, easy to create applications
for, and easy to integrate with the physical world and with enterprise
IT systems. Several technologies are poised to contribute including gaming,
geographic information systems, Web technologies, artificial intelligence,
information retrieval, database management, cloud computing, service oriented
architectures and others. This workshop aims to bring together knowledgeable
international researchers and virtual world developers from areas that can
contribute to accelerating our understanding of 3D virtual world architectures
aimed at understanding the kinds of extensible 3D virtual world platforms that
will be needed in the next five years to construct a rich variety of
applications that 3D virtual worlds can make possible.

THEMES/TOPICS

Example themes for position papers could include: terminology,
requirements, examples, driving or killer apps, potential for standards,
and research challenges.

o Theme 1: Extensible Virtual World Architectures
- Extensible Architecture ? Services, plugins, mix-and-match ? subtracting
or adding features. Evolution as new capabilities are added.
- Scaling Virtual Worlds ? Many prims, many avatars, ? a hospital full of
equipment, a stadium full of people, Second Earth, ? tiny, cosmic.
Connecting enclaves that have different properties.
- Populating and Provisioning Virtual Worlds ? how can we rapidly populate
a large space by importing (or generating) terrain, buildings, and
objects? What GIS, CAD, and other standards should we build on? How can
we engage the community?

o Theme 2: Virtual World Applications
- Driving Applications ? Modeling Healthcare, Retail, Battlefields, Real
Estate, Museums, Archaeology Sites, etc
- VW Enterprise Apps or games ? How to layer them onto the core virtual
world architecture
- Planning and Workflows ? How to organize a collection of avatar bots to
cooperate to solve a problem in a virtual world
- Economies ? Modeling and trading systems in virtual worlds. Integrating
with real world currency systems.

o Theme 3: Integration with the Real World
- Mirror Worlds ? Tying the real and virtual world together. Using virtual
world as a command post. Rural telemedicine. Modeling supply chains.
Sensor networks and RFID.
- Smart Networked Objects ? What protocols are needed to make an ordinary
object smart and networked? Identity, messaging, API reflection, access
control, virtual model.
- Man-Machine Interface ? how can people communicate with smart networked
(real or virtual) objects or collections of them?

o Theme 4: Enhanced Capabilities
- VW Search Engines and Query Language ? Spatial queries, temporal
queries, etc
- Ontologies ? Adding ontologies to make virtual worlds semantic (by
analogy to the semantic web)
- Time ? Modeling past and future using virtual worlds
- Scoping ? When are virtual worlds appropriate, when are other modeling
technologies more appropriate, can these different modeling technologies
interoperate?
- Security ? Alternatives to simple access control, digital rights,
microlicensing, micropayments,
- Grief/Fraud ? Modeling systems and tools for identifying users creating
grief/fraud in the virtual world.

IMPORTANT DATES

Suggestions for Additional Themes: 15 December 2009
Registration/Paper Submission*: 1 February 2010
Notification of Acceptance: 1 March 2010
Workshop Dates: 29 March - 2 April 2010
* short position papers and/or full research paper

INSTRUCTIONS

The workshop will take place the week of March 29-April 2, 2010 as a series
of small group thematic discussions in Second Life at various SLURL venues
to be announced (avatar registration required). Each small group discussion
will focus on a theme and will last around 3 hours. A moderator will ask the
group a set of questions (available beforehand) and a scribe (volunteer from
the group) will record the meeting and summarize the discussion in a 2-3 page
brief that will be posted on the workshop homepage soon after that discussion.

To be invited to a session, you must write a 1-2 page position paper
(single-spaced, include position paper title, your name(s), your avatar name
(for registration), your contact information and affiliation, your time zone
for planning purposes, your virtual world credentials/experience, and your
views on some aspect of a topic ? see Themes/Topics). You may write
multiple position papers to be invited to different thematic discussions.
Position papers will be posted on the workshop homepage. Tiny groups will be
merged and big groups split to keep group size around 5-10 (some topics may
be covered by more than one group).

Accommodation will be made for longer research papers or presentations for
those who want to present recent results to a mid-sized audience. These
papers/presentations will be reviewed for relevance. Accepted papers/
presentations will be posted on the workshop homepage. During the workshop,
a schedule will be posted on the workshop homepage - the speaker will present
and attendance will be limited to around 50 avatars, first-come-first-served
from among registered participants.

Accommodation will also be made for additional themes or topics as suggested
by participants ? include a paragraph describing the scope of theme. Since
this workshop is focused on virtual world architectures, we are limiting
additional themes to that general area, not to also include general social
networking or cultural issues that do not focus on architectural aspects.

SECOND LIFE LOGISTICS

The workshop will take place in Second Life, a 3D virtual world. To
participate in the workshop, in addition to submitting a short or long paper,
you will need to become (somewhat) proficient in using Second Life. To get
started: [see workshop website for some suggestions]. More instructions to
follow - if your short/long paper is accepted (notification
date is 1 March 2010), we'll send you information on pre-workshop socials
inworld where you can meet other workshop attendees and practice communicating.
If you are presenting a long paper (using .ppt for a presentation), we will
send you instructions related to uploading your presentation and we'll give
you some time to practice presenting in the two weeks before the workshop.