Message from the General Co-Chairs AIVR 2020

We like to welcome you to the third IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (IEEE AIVR 2020). As we approach the end of this year, the COVID-19 pandemic is still keeping most of the world at hold. The last months have demanded a lot from everyone, which is why we are extremely proud of the work done by everyone involved in this year’s conference in putting together a strong and wonderful program and transforming it from the common on-location format to a pure virtual event.

We thank the program co-chairs Min-Chun Hu, Jason Orlosky, Jonathan Ventura, Zerrin Yumak, and Stefanie Zollmann, who managed the major track of the conference consisting of scientific full and short papers addressing various areas related to AI, VR/AR/MR, and the combination of both. The poster co-chairs Peter Kán, Kangsoo Kim, Hai-Ning Liang, and Andrii Matviienko as well as the demo and video paper co-chairs Abdallah El Ali and Sebastian Günther put together a very exciting program for the hands-on poster and demo sessions. Likewise, we express our gratitude to the industry co-chairs Saskia Groenewegen, Jianquan Liu, Omar Niamut, Federico Perazzi, Vishy Swaminathan, and Vinoba Vinayagamoorthy for their work in implementing the industry track of the program. We also like to thank all the program committee members and reviewers of these tracks for their tremendous work which guaranteed a diverse and high-quality program. The technical program of the conference is complemented by two special sessions and five exciting workshops. We express our deepest gratitude to the special session and workshop organizers who made this possible.

Now in its third year, IEEE AIVR keeps establishing new connections by bringing together researchers and practitioners from various areas related to VR/AR/MR and AI. This is again reflected by keynote speakers and invited speakers from academia as well as industries. From academia, we are welcoming Mark Billinghurst (University of South Australia, Australia, and University of Auckland, New Zealand), Mehdi Dastani (Utrecht University, Netherlands), Victoria Interrante (University of Minnesota, USA), and Philipp Slusallek (DFKI and Saarland University, Germany). Andrew Glassner (Weta Digital), Saskia Groenewegen (Ordina), and Jacki Morie (All These Worlds, LLC) are the industry presenters complementing this impressive line-up. Last but not least, we like to thank all the authors and attendants from various areas of the world.

While we would have loved to welcome you all in Europe in the Netherlands, as originally planned, we are also quite excited to host the conference for the first time as a fully virtual event. We are particularly curious about the poster and demo sessions, which will complement the standard online presentations of the main program and take place in the Mozilla Hubs virtual environment. We thank the virtual setup co-chairs Simon Dirks, Andrii Matviienko, Florian Müller, and Ivar Troost for making this possible. Likewise, our appreciation goes out to all the people working in the organization of the event, including the financial co-chairs George Wang and Martijn Dekker, local arrangement chair Geraldine Leebeek, and the various people from IEEE for their support and efforts; in particular Cristina Ceballos, Partick Kellenberger, Marie Trinh, Momoko Vanna, Steve Woods, and Tricia Yamaguchi.

We are also thankful for the continuous in-cooperation support from the Eurographics Association and the Association of Computing Machinery and their Special Interest Groups ACM SIGAI, ACM SIGGRAPH, and ACM SIGCHI, and appreciate the work of our publicity co-chairs Tobias Höllerer, Rob Lindeman, Mar Gonzalez-Franco, and Katsunori Okajima, and highly acknowledge the support from our advisory committee, which included Josephine Anstey, Jeremy Bailenson, Mark Billinghurst, Gary B. Glesener, Hirokazu Kato, Dave Pape, and Steve Feiner.

We hope that you will enjoy and appreciate the great program put together through the work of all these people and wish you an exciting and interesting IEEE AIVR 2020!

Sincerely,

Wolfgang Hürst, Philipp Sheu, and Jeffrey Tsai

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