Context and motivations

It has been 10 years since the first research activities in Virtual and Mixed Reality (V&MR) were launched at the University of Paris-Sud by LIMSI, the Computer Science laboratory of CNRS for Mechanical and Engineering Sciences. To structure this activity within the laboratory, a team named VENISE [1] was created in January 2001. The general research interest of this group is presently to study multimodal and collaborative interactions with multi-sensorimotor immersive systems based on V&MR technologies. One characteristic of the VENISE team is to focus its research on applications that manage complex datasets, and/or address users with high expertises, for instance: Computer Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Physics, Bioinformatics, Design, Engineering & Manufacturing or Tele-operation. On the other hand, the CNRS/LIMSI has developed since 2003 a research effort in spatialized 3D audio which is currently supported by the “Audio & Acoustics” group.

In this context, the CNRS/LIMSI was interested, early on, by the setup of a large and reconfigurable immersive Virtual Environment. Such a VE is justified for perceiving massive and complex datasets within the V&MR applications we are developing, while collaborative interactions are useful for most of these applications as well. To address these research issues, the CNRS/LIMSI designed a large CAVE-like system named Evolutive Virtual Environment (EVE) which includes many original features.

The inauguration of such an innovative VE system is an important event for the French and European V&MR communities. For this reason, we thought that several thematic workshops should be associated with demo sessions, mainly for launching discussions on advanced VR/VE research and applications that such innovative VE system may support. At the same time, according to the understanding that VENISE team has of these V&MR communities [2], it seemed that EuroVR should launch as soon as possible the animation of Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and that an fruitful meeting could be organised between JVRC’09 (December 2009) and the next EGVE (planed in Autumn 2010). Taking into account the research interests of the CNRS/LIMSI in the field of V&MR, we decided to propose a 2 days joint meeting combining the EVE inauguration with 3 thematic workshops focused on possible SIGs of EuroVR.