1 Introduction Imagine a virtual world with digital creatures that looks like real life, sounds like real life, and even feels like real life. Imagine a virtual world not only with nice three dimensional graphics and animations, but also with realistic physical laws and forces. This virtual world could be familiar, reproducing some parts of our reality, or unfa miliar, with strange "physical" laws and artificial life forms. As a researcher interested in the sciences of complexity, the idea of a conference about virtual worlds emerged from frustration. In the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in the design of artificial environments using image synthesis and virtual reality. The emergence of industry standards such as VRML [1] is an illustra tion of this growing interest. At the same time, the field of Artificial Life has ad dressed and modeled complex phenomena such as self organization, reproduction, development, and evolution of artificial life like systems [2]. One of the most popular works in this field has been Tierra designed by Tom Ray: an environment producing synthetic organisms based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the "energy" resource and memory is the "material" resource [3]. Memory is or ganized into informational patterns that exploit CPU time for self replication. Muta tion generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different creatures compete for CPU time and memory space.

Inhalt

Invited Paper.- Real Face Communication in a Virtual World.- Virtual Reality (1).- Animated Impostors for Real-Time Display of Numerous Virtual Humans.- Can We Define Virtual Reality? The M R IC Model.- Distortion in Distributed Virtual Environments.- VRML Based Behaviour Database Editor.- Virtual Reality (2).- The Scan&Track Virtual Environment.- CyberGlass: Vision-Based VRML2 Navigator.- Work Task Analysis and Selection of Interaction Devices in Virtual Environments.- Effect of Stereoscopic Viewing on Human Tracking Performance in Dynamic Virtual Environments.- Virtual Reality (3).- Interactive Movie: A Virtual World with Narratives.- Real-Image-Based Virtual Studio.- Pop-Out Videos.- Color Segmentation and Color Correction Using Lighting and White Balance Shifts.- Invited Paper.- Designing Emergence in Animated Artificial Life Worlds.- Artificial Life.- ALife Meets Web: Lessons Learned.- Information Flocking: Data Visualisation in Virtual Worlds Using Emergent Behaviours.- Nerve Garden: A Public Terrarium in Cyberspace.- A Two Dimensional Virtual World to Explain the Genetic Code Structure?.- Multi-Agent.- Grounding Agents in EMud Artificial Worlds.- Towards Virtual Experiment Laboratories: How Multi-Agent Simulations Can Cope with Multiple Scales of Analysis and Viewpoints.- A Model for the Evolution of Environments.- ARéVi: A Virtual Reality Multiagent Platform.- Complexity.- Investigating the Complex with Virtual Soccer.- Webots: Symbiosis Between Virtual and Real Mobile Robots.- Vision Sensors on the Webots Simulator.- Grounding Virtual Worlds in Reality.- Applications (1).- Growing Virtual Communities in 3D Meeting Spaces.- A Mixed 2D/3D Interface for Music Spatialization.- Organizing Information in 3D.- Human Centered Virtual Interactive Image World for Image Retrieval.- Applications (2).- Virtual Great Barrier Reef: A Theoretical Approach Towards an Evolving, Interactive VR Environment Using a Distributed DOME and CAVE System.- The Development of an Intelligent Haulage Truck Simulator for Improving the Safety of Operation in Surface Mines.- Navigation in Large VR Urban Models.- Virtual Worlds and Art.- Art and Virtual Worlds.- Las Meninas in VR: Storytelling and the Illusion in Art.- Mitologies: Medieval Labyrinth Narratives in Virtual Reality.- Aggregate Worlds: Virtual Architecture Aftermath.- Zeuxis vs RealityEngine: Digital Realism and Virtual Worlds.- Avatars: New Fields of Implication.