Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGGRAPH international conference on Virtual Reality continuum and its applications in industry

Rapid advances in interactive and display techniques promise to make our work, learning, and leisure vastly more efficient, effective, and appealing. Because the appropriate mix of virtual environment and real environment varies with the application, we use the term virtual reality continuum (VRC), proposed by Professor Jose Encarnacao, to describe the continuum from the real environment through augmented reality and augmented virtuality to the virtual environment. Fundamental research has been rapidly evolving within the virtual reality continuum, resulting in new algorithms, new systems, and new devices. Also, multi-faceted applications have emerged in areas such as engineering, science, defense, education, and entertainment. The goal of VRCAI 2004 is to provide a forum for the scientists, researchers, developers, and users in the international VRC community to share experiences, exchange ideas, and disseminate knowledge of this fast-growing field.In 1995, the first International Workshop on Virtual Reality and Visualization in Scientific Computing was held in Hangzhou, China. This small, twenty-five attendee workshop was supported by a National Science Foundation award # INT 9416822. Selected papers from this workshop were published in a special issue of Computers & Graphics (Vol.20, No.2, 1996). In 1999, an International Workshop on Virtual Reality and Applications was held in China and the plenary talks from this workshop were published in The International Journal of Virtual Reality (Vol.4, No. 3, 2000). In April, 2002, the International Conference on Virtual Reality and its Applications in Industry (VRAI02) was held in Hangzhou, China. Selected papers from this conference were published in the International Journal of CAD/CAM, International Journal of Image and Graphics, and a special issue of Computers & Graphics (Vol.27, No.2, 2003). A technical report summarizing the meeting can be found on the ACM SIGGRAPH website (http://www.siggraph.org/reports/VRAI2002). In September 2003, the International Virtual Reality and its Application in Industry (VRAI 2003) was held in Tianjin, China.As interest in virtual reality has grown worldwide, this activity also expanded within China through the conferences described above. As these conferences have progressed, they have shown increasingly broad composition in both speakers and attendees. We now feel it is essential to support additional globalization of these efforts by holding the conference outside China for the first time and by having it sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH and in cooperation with Eurographics, Chinese Society of Images and Graphics, and INI-GraphicsNet. An international steering committee has been put into place to provide guidance and continuity for future conferences and to select future conference organizers, with the intention of holding some of the future conferences in other countries to increase the globalization efforts.This year's conference attracted nearly 150 submissions from almost thirty countries in Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australasia. Submissions were carefully reviewed by more than sixty-five reviewers of domain experts, with each paper receiving at least three reviews. Eighty-eight papers were accepted.