Welcome to Lafayette!
Our first get-together before the workshop. We were at one of the famous locations in Lafayette, the Blue Dog Restaurant. From left to right: Gregor, Ingo, Shun-Yun and Jeff.
The food was great, very spicy. From left to right: Shun-Yun, Jeff, Arno and Gregor.
Our location for the workshop: The Cajundome Convention Center (right).
It was a rainy sunday morning. We were there early... and lonely, since people just came about half an hour later, arround 8:45 a.m.
The workshop is about to begin. Arno welcomes everybody to the 2nd International Workshop on Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments.
Shun-Yun introduces our keynote speaker, Jeff Kesselman.
Jeff Kesselman, CTO of Rebel Monkey Inc., gives a highly interesting keynote.
The keynote is about “Massively Multi-player Online Environments: Memories of the Past, Visions of the Future”.
After the keynote, there was a small break where everybody tried to get a coffee.
After the small break we are almost ready for the first session.
Phil from the Heriot-Watt University in UK gives the first talk in the first session.
He talked about “Dessign Issues for Peer-to-Peer Massively Multiplayer Online Games”, which was a great “opener” for all workshop topics.
The second talk was given by Shun-Yun who is with the National Central University in Taiwan.
Shun-Yun presented his approach for “Spatial Publish Subscribe”.
The third talk was given by Ingo from the University of Trier in Germany.
Ingo presented their work entitled “HyperVerse - Simulation and Testbed Reconciled”.
After Ingos talk, there was the lunch break. After lunch people slowly came back for the second session.
Also in the second session, Phil had the first talk.
This time he talked about “Deadline-Driven Auctions for NPC Host Allocation in P2P MMOGs”. Phil actually presetend the work of Lu Fan, who could not be there due to Visa-trouble.
The second talk in the second session was given by Stephan from the University of Karlsruhe.
He presented “QuON -- a Quad-Tree Based Overlay Protocol for Distributed Virtual Worlds”.
The last talk in the second session was given by Mario from ICAR-CNR, Italy.
He presented their work on “Middleware Mechanisms for Interaction Interoperability in Collaborative Virtual Environments”.
After the second session there was again a short coffee-break.
The third session was an open panel discussion. Gregor checks if our panelists are there and ready for the session :)
Our panelist are Shun-Yun, Jeff, and Jan.
The session starts and Gregor presents the panel topics.
Our panellists prepare for their (controversary) opinions.
Shun-Yun believes in user-generated content.
Jeff does not.
Jan is also very sceptic, and looks in general for an answer to whether we really need massively multiuser for virtual environments besides games.
With the panel our workshop ends.
However, the discussions do not end...
The discussions go on, while standing still in the conference room...
From the conference room we moved to the exhibition hall, ...
... where the vivid discussion moved on ...
... and moved on....
At some point in time we decided to interrupt our discussions to actually have a look at the exhibition.
At the exhibition, the dominating topic was 3D - all kind of shutter glasses and polarizing glasses were present.
Arno tried the virtual welding installation. It seemed so real, that people claimed they could even smell the typical welding smell. Ahhh, well...
After the exhibition, we decided to go to the bar in our hotel to cotinue our discussions. Unfortunately it was closed, so we stayed in the hotel foyer for some time ...
... the hotel decided to open the bar for us. So, here we are moving to the bar, still discussing...
.. and discussing, until it was really late. This was the end of day one, a quite sucessfull and fruitfull day.
The next day the main conference, the IEEE VR 2009, started. Here very early in the morning some introductionary words by the general chair.
A little bit later it started to fill up..
Ingo was also there... listening or checking email - we probably will never know :)
A lot of the talks were about user studies. This is interesting for the VR community, but not so much for us, who are interested in the underlying networks.
Lunch time. Everybody with a ticket got one burger. No more comments on this one.
Even if it is not the usual food of Lafayette, when you're hungry, you eat... and listening to talks makes you hungry, so....
Towards the evening of this day, there was the poster session.
Jeff is interested in automated avatar creation.
Jan listens the explanations.
It was kind of crowded at the posters.
In this evening we went over to L..I.T.E.
First things first: Food. Here they served good food, i.e. no burgers.
In the background you see the entrance to a fully fledged 3D cinema. I would like one of these at my home.
Before moving to the next interesting point, we strengthen ourselfs (again). More than understandable, since lunch is long gone, and the burger was small..
Different caves were presented. This one here is called a treadmill, since the floor moves under the person.
This person can actually walk arround normally. The treadmill counters his movements and puts him always back in the middle. Add 3D technology and we get really close to Star Treks Holodeck.
One of the autonomous cars which took part in the DARPA challenge.
They took the acronym LITE seriously and build something which lights in different colors in front of the LITE building.
The social event of the IEEE VR 2009 took place in Vermillion Ville.
This place is full of history.
Here we actually learned what the terms Acadian and Cajun means and where it comes from. Also the french heritages where unveiled.
Jeff and Gregor.
The boat-house.
A boat.
Nice neighborhood.
Different tools, used to build all kind of stuff from wood.
A church.
Gregor an Jeff are crossing the small swamp-like water. It proved to be harder than imagined.
The evening program was enriched by a local band called L'Angelus.
Unfortunately also this evening ended, and next day most of us had already their flight back. Hence, as a summary, we had a great time, vivid discussions, and much fun. We hope to see everybody again next year at the 3rd MMVE'10.
