Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)

THE IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) continues to be the leading venue for disseminating the latest in AR and MR research, applications, technologies, and companies, and this special section presents significantly extended versions of the three best papers from the IEEE ISMAR 2009 Proceedings. These papers place particular emphasis on two of the most important active research areas in the AR and MR field: tracking, and applications including usability studies. IEEE ISMAR 2009 had 130 submissions. ISMAR has a twotiered reviewingsystemconsistingof agroupof 12areachairs, as well as an international program committee and outside reviewers, altogether comprising 173 AR/MR experts. The review process of each paper was organized by an area chair. It received at least four reviews from PC members. These were reported by the area chair and discussed at length during a physical meeting of the area chair committee in Orlando in July 2009. The overall acceptance rate of 19.3 percent is an indication of the significant effort expanded in selecting the best papers. A separately installed awards committee of pioneering and leading MR and AR researchers from around the globe reexamined the long papers with the five highest scores to select the Best Paper, the Best Student Paper, and an Honorable Mention. The authors of the three papers with awards were asked to submit an extended version of their conference paper, with a clear focus of additional content that expands and enhances the scientific contribution of the original conference paper. A standard IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) reviewing cycle was initiated and all accepted papers underwent multiple revisions and reviews by each reviewer. Significant efforts by many people were invested to ensure the quality of this special section, and we guest editors are very grateful. Steven Henderson and Steven Feiner received the Best Paper Award for their contribution: “Exploring the Benefits of Augmented Reality Documentation for Maintenance and Repair.” It reports on a prototype system to support military personnel in performing maintenance tasks in a turret. Impressively, the system has been installed and extensively tested in the narrow space of a real turret with real mechanical engineers. The Best Student Paper was presented by Nate Hagbi, Oriel Bergig, Jihad El-Sana, and Mark Billinghurst: “Shape Recognition and Pose Estimation for Mobile Augmented Reality.” Although tracking has been a topic for a long time, most current solutions use specialized algorithms referring to given shape properties or locally planar textures. This paper presents the Nestor system, which allows users to present new 2D shapes. It automatically analyzes its contour and generates a shape descriptor from projective invariants of concavities in the contour. Subsequently, the contour can be tracked and augmented in 3D. Susanna Nilsson, Björn J.E. Johansson, and Arne Jönsson received an Honorable Mention for their paper: “CrossOrganizational Collaboration Supported by Augmented Reality.” They report on extensive user studies for supporting collaboration between rescues services in firefighting scenarios. As pointed out in the paper, providing collaborative AR support is not a straightforward extension to single-user interfaces, yet it bears particular promise since users with different interests and background (such as policemen, firefighters, and military personnel) can share real artifacts such as a map of the environment while augmenting it with individualized information in individual views in HMDs. Thanks to the IEEE ISMAR 2009 Awards Committee, including Henry Fuchs, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Hirokazu Kato, NAIST, Ulrich Neumann, University of Southern California, Didier Stricker, DFKI, Reinhold Behringer, Leeds MU, Mark Livingston, Naval Research Laboratory, and Bruce Thomas, University of South Australia, who selected the best papers for inclusion in this special section. Finally, thanks to the reviewers who provided very detailed and careful reviews for the included papers.