The Metaverse (Some Assembly Required)

D. Linda Gar­cia and I, together with Hanan Gazit at H.I.T., will serve as guest edi­tors for a forth­com­ing spe­cial issue of the Jour­nal of Vir­tual Worlds Research. In addi­tion to reg­u­lar papers, the spe­cial issue will fea­ture some of the papers pre­sented at the SLACTIONS con­fer­ence in late September.

The meta­verse is emerg­ing, through the increas­ing use of vir­tual world tech­nolo­gies that act as plat­forms for end-users to cre­ate, develop, and inter­act, expand­ing the realm of human coop­er­a­tion, inter­ac­tion, and cre­ativ­ity. The con­fer­ence focus is sci­en­tific research on appli­ca­tions and devel­op­ments of these meta­verse plat­forms: Sec­ond Life, Open­Sim, Open Cro­quet, Active­worlds, Open Source Meta­verse, Project Won­der­land, and oth­ers, pro­vid­ing a forum for the research com­mu­nity to present and dis­cuss inno­v­a­tive approaches, tech­niques, processes, and research results.

For more infor­ma­tion, see the JVWR site. (And be sure to check out their new issue — guest-edited by Mia and Mark and fea­tur­ing, among oth­ers, a nice arti­cle by Burcu and a round­table with amaz­ing Sarah and bril­liant Liz).