MM

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the third edition of the ACM International Workshop on Multimedia Alternate Realities, AltMM 2018.

Novel multimedia technologies enable us to experience imaginary 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 immersed 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.

Recent advancements in multimedia and related technologies facilitated creating increased computational capabilities to produce hypermedia content with higher quality in multiple human sensory domains, including audio, visual, haptic, olfactory, and taste. Such advances have enabled the creation of immersive experiences that may involve the user in a different or augmented world, as an alternate reality. The AltMM workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in both academia and industry to foster the creation of novel multimedia technologies that allows users to experience alternate realities. By exploring the meaning of alternate realness and the research questions for designing, creating, consuming, and evaluating alternate reality experience, AltMM serves as a unique international venue to foster the ideation of alternate realities based on immersive and interactive multimedia systems of the future.

AltMM 2018 keynote speaker is Professor Woontack Woo from the Graduate School of Cultural Technology (GSCT) at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea. His keynote highlights several concerns and future avenues towards improving the quality of life through augmented human technology that helps humans to live as smart citizens in a Smart City. We are pleased to have Professor Woo at the workshop and we thank him for sharing his thoughts on the important issue of 'augmented humans' and the framework of context-aware VR/AR.

The technical program of AltMM 2018 also includes two paper sessions covering a diverse set of topics, including: Innovative Display and Interaction Techniques to deploy immersive multimedia experiences, via head-mounted displays or cave automatic virtual environments; and the Design of Virtual Collaborative Experiences, such as augmented reality tours or escape room games to be presented as oral presentations and technical demonstrations. The papers were accepted after the workshop submissions were carefully reviewed and shepherded by the workshop Program Committee (PC) members, with at least three reviewers per paper. In addition to the keynote and paper sessions, there will be a talk and interactive session to envision the future opportunities in this field.