Ebook: Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2004: Third International Conference, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, September 1-3, 2004. Proceedings

The advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT) has enabled broad use of ICT and facilitated the use of ICT in the private and personal domain. ICT-related industries are directing their business targets to home applications. Among these applications, entertainment will differentiate ICT applications in the private and personal market from the of?ce. Comprehensive research and development on ICT - plications for entertainment will be different for the promotion of ICT use in the home and other places for leisure. So far engineering research and development on enterta- ment has never been really established in the academic communities. On the other hand entertainment-related industries such as the video and computer game industries have been growing rapidly in the last 10 years, and today the entertainment computing bu- ness outperforms the turnover of the movie industry. Entertainment robots are drawing theattentionofyoungpeople. TheeventcalledRoboCuphasbeenincreasingthenumber of participants year by year. Entertainment technologies cover a broad range of pr- ucts and services: movies, music, TV (including upcoming interactive TV), VCR, VoD (including music on demand), computer games, game consoles, video arcades, g- bling machines, the Internet (e. g. , chat rooms, board and card games, MUD), intelligent toys, edutainment, simulations, sport, theme parks, virtual reality, and upcoming service robots. The?eldofentertainmentcomputingfocusesonusers’growinguseofentertainment technologies at work, in school and at home, and the impact of this technology on their behavior. Nearly every working and living place has computers, and over two-thirds of childreninindustrializedcountrieshavecomputersintheirhomesaswell.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2004, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands in September 2004.

The 27 revised full papers, 27 revised short papers, 18 revised poster papers, and 3 demo papers presented together with 3 keynote papers and 3 invited topic papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 114 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on advanced interaction design; art, design, and media; augmented, virtual, and mixed reality; computers and games; human factors and games; intelligent games; mobile entertainment; sound and music; and visual media engineering.