Simon Richir

VRIC 2008 (Laval Virtual) Special Issue

Simon Richir is Professor at ENSAM (Arts & Metiers ParisTech), high French engineers school, and director of "Presence & Innovation" research lab. He is scientific chair of 10th Virtual Reality International Conference (Laval, France). Dr. Richirs education and research domains are technological innovation, innovative projects driving and engineering design of Virtual reality systems.

Indira Thouvenin

VRIC 2008 (Laval Virtual) Special Issue

Indira Thouvenin works as an associate professor at the University of Technology Compiegne. She is teaching Virtual Reality at the department of mechanical systems. Her research interest is in the field of collaborative design in virtual environments, believability of virtual worlds, and knowledge integration in CVE. This line of research is connecting the digital mock up to the virtual mock up considering the user perception while designing in a cooperative context. A recent interest is the question of 2D/3D: representation of knowledge is often in a 2D dimension while navigation in a virtual mock up is made in 3D. Virtual environments can be augmented adding intent in navigation and offering dynamic representations with new metaphors for interaction.

Torsten Kuhlen

GI VR/AR Workshop 2008 Special Issue

Torsten Kuhlen is the head of the Virtual Reality Group at RWTH Aachen University, and a lecturer in computer science as well as electrical engineering. He received his Diploma in Computer Science in 1992 and a doctoral degree in natural sciences from RWTH Aachen in 1998. His research interests concern basic technologies as well as scientific applications of VR. He was responsible for several VR joint research projects in the field of mechanical engineering, flow simulation, medicine, and life science, funded by the German Research Foundation, the German Federal Research Ministry, and industry. He is a co-organizer and a member in the program committee of several international VR and visualization conferences. Since 2006, he is the speaker of the steering committee of the VR/AR chapter of Germany's computer society.

José Braz

GRAPP 2008 Special Issue

José Braz was born in Lisbon in 1963. In 1987 concluded a MsC degree in Radiotechnical Engineering from the Одесский политехнический институт, in Odessa, former USSR, and in 2004, when coming back from industry to research, finished one other Master Thesis in Computer Graphics from the IST/UTL, Lisbon. In the present he is working on its PhD thesis around the insertion of animated humanoids in augmented reality scenarios.

He is currently Adjunct Professor at the Department of Systems and informatics of the High School of Technology at the Politechnic Institute of Setúbal while does its research work at the VIMMI group in the INESC-ID. As editor he has some books published on Kluwer – Enterprise Information Systems IV (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Kluwer Academics Publishers, 2003) and Springer – Informatics on Control, Automation and Robotics I (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, Springer, 2006) and “Advances in Computer Graphics and Computer Vision” (Berlin, Germany, Springer, 2007).

Professor Braz is member of the Eurographics Association and President of the General Assembly of INSTICC – Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication. In the past three years he was the Conference Chair of GRAPP – International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications.

Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

EuroITV 2006 Special Issue

Konstantinos Chorianopoulos holds an MEng (Electronics and Computer Engineering, 1999) an MSc. (Marketing and Communication, 2001), and a Ph.D. (Human-Computer Interaction, 2004).Since 1997, he has been a member of four academic research labs (Greece, UK, Germany), which specialize in the areas of multimedia, e-commerce, intelligent systems and interaction design. He has participated in many EC research projects in the field of human- computer interaction for information, communication and entertainment applications in TV, mobile, and ubiquitous appliances. In 2002, he founded UITV.INFO, which is a newsletter and web portal for interactive television research resources (papers, theses), news and events. In 2006, he organized the 4th European Interactive TV conference in Athens, Greece. Since April 2006, he is a Marie Curie post-doc fellow at the department of architecture at the Bauhaus University of Weimar, in Germany.