International Workshop held at ACM Multimedia 2018 - October 22-26, 2018, Seoul, Korea

Multimedia experiences allow us to access other worlds, to live other people's stories, to communicate with or experience alternate realities. Different spaces, times or situations can be entered thanks to multimedia contents and systems, which coexist with our current reality, and are sometimes so vivid and engaging that we feel we are living in them. Advances in multimedia are making it possible to create immersive experiences that may involve the user in a different or augmented world, as an alternate reality.

The 3rd edition of AltMM workshop aims at exploring how the synergy between multimedia technologies can foster the creation of alternate realities and make their access an enriching and valuable experience. We seek contributions that present multimedia technologies, methods and measurement approaches from the perspective of “enabling other realities”.

In particular, prospective contributions must address one or more of the following dimensions when characterizing the type of multimedia alternate reality that they are aiming for:

• Alternate ‐ refers to what is alternate about it: different space, time, situation, and so on;

• Virtual/Augmented ‐ how far or close to the actual reality content can be experienced, ranging from totally virtual to augmented reality (VR/AR);

• Real/Fictional ‐ how real or fictional the content is;

• Interactive ‐ the level of interactivity as a means of engagement and immersion;

• Immersive ‐ level in perceptual, cognitive and emotional terms, the sense of presence and belonging, the quality of the content and the experience, imagination and engagement;

• Multisensorial ‐ the media involved and how much mulsemedia it is, also going beyond audiovisual content to include the five senses;

• Personal ‐ adaptation to individual preferences and contexts;

• Social ‐ individualized vs shared experiences and communication.

Contributions should aim at  enabling alternate realities experiences through multimedia technologies, design and evaluation methods for their creation and consumption. This involves the use of different types of media content (audiovisual, haptics, smell, and taste), increased immersion (e.g., 3D, holographic, UHD, 360°, and stereoscopic audio), new interaction devices, environments, modalities, and formats.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Creation and Consumption of Alternate Realities

• capturing and sensing

• content production and authoring, interactive storytelling, digital narratives, cinema and TV

• crowdsourcing and co‐creation

• delivery, rendering, and consumption paradigms, co‐experience and communication

• personalization, post‐processing, enhancement and real‐time adaptation

Design and Evaluation of Alternate Realities Experience

• assessment and prediction of engagement, immersion and flow

• experience evaluation through analysis of quantitative (e.g. physiological data, self reports) and qualitative data (e.g. observations, in-depth interviews)

• measurements and metrics to quantify the quality of alternate reality experiences

• field trial reports and user studies

Alternate Realities Applications

• from more traditional to innovative applications, e.g. based on multi‐device and multisensory shared content consumption, in asynchronous or live scenarios

• in domains like personal media, culture, tourism, art, education, entertainment, manufacturing, training, health and wellbeing, etc.

The full day workshop program will contain a combination of oral and invited keynote presentations, posters and demos, altogether enabling interactive scientific sharing and discussion between practitioners and researchers. AltMM 2018 welcomes submissions of full papers (max 6 pages), as well as short papers (max 4 pages) that report work‐in‐progress, presenting new, unpublished, original research. Accompanying demonstrations or videos are very welcome and highly appreciated. Papers will be judged on their relevance, novelty, scientific and technical content and correctness, and clarity of presentation. Guidelines and templates can be found on the website. The workshop proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library. Further, a Special Issue of a top ranked multimedia journal related to the workshop series is being planned.

Important Dates:

• Submission: July 8, 2018

• Notification: August 5, 2018

• Camera Ready: August 17, 2018

• Workshop: October 22 or 26, 2018

Workshop website: http://altmm2018.di.fc.ul.pt/

Conference website: http://www.acmmm.org/2018/

Workshop chairs:

• Teresa Chambel, LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

• Francesca De Simone, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the Netherlands

• Rene Kaiser, Know-Center - Research Center for Data-Driven Business and Big Data Analytics, Austria

• Nimesha Ranasinghe, School of Computing and Information Science, University of Maine, ME, USA

• Wendy Van den Broeck, imec-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium