Message from the Program Chairs

Summary form only given. On behalf of the program committee we are pleased to be able to introduce the program of the IEEE Virtual Reality 2009 Conference. We have a full program of events this year, but based on feedback from previous years, this has been streamlined into a single track of presentations. There will be 21 full paper presentations, 14 sketch presentations, 3 panels and a keynote presentation by Elizabeth Baron. There will also be an Open House at the Louisiana Immersive Technology Enterprise and a poster session with 29 posters on display. As in previous years, the two days preceding the main conference are occupied with six workshops, four tutorials and the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces. For the main program we received 103 submissions, down slightly from the previous year. One reason for this might be that this year, the submission process for the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces overlapped with the IEEE Virtual Reality submission process, whereas in previous years it did not. Of the 76 full-paper submissions, 21 were accepted, an acceptance rate of 27%. Of the 27 sketch submissions, eight were accepted, an acceptance rate of 30%. A further six full paper submissions (8%) were accepted in sketch format. The review process did not change from the previous year. For each submission, one member of the program committee was assigned to act as the primary reviewer. In addition for each submission, two members of the program committee were assigned to act as secondary reviewers. The primary reviewer was responsible for overseeing the review of the paper, and to solicit one (for sketch submission) or two (for full paper submissions) external expert reviewers. Once the two secondary reviews and the one or two external reviews were received, the primary led an online discussion to moderate the scores and reach an initial recommendation. They then wrote a summary of the reviews to present at the program committee. This year, for various reasons, - e were not able to hold a face-to-face program committee meeting, so in an experiment we held the program committee online in Second Life. The consensus of the program committee members who attended was that this worked very well, and it allowed more members of the program committee to attend for some period.