A Message from the Chairs

We would like to welcome you all to The First International Conference on Immersive Telecommunications, IMMERSCOM 2007, and to Verona. IMMERSCOM intends to bridge the traditional gap existing between immersive technologies and networking, focusing on how traditional and emerging fields can be brought together with a focus on networking to better serve users and the society overall. Constantly growing research activities in these areas created naturally the need for such a Conference series. It is our belief and hope that this interest will grow and the series will be strongly anchored. As the lucky beginners we were able to put together a highly attractive Technical Program. It consists of keynote speeches from luminaries in the field, an outstanding program of technical sessions, and a panel to discuss the future of immersive communications. Our keynote speakers are Prof. Marc Cavazza from the University of Teesside, UK; and Dr. Harlyn Baker from Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, USA. The former speech is on immersive interactive media and the latter speech is on immersive videoconferencing systems.

Many people have helped making this conference a success. We would like to thank the Organizing Committee for their excellent service. In particular, we would like to thank Cha Zhang and Ricardo Leonardo, the Technical Program Chairs, Newton Lee, the Publicity Chair, Alberto Signoroni and Nicola Adami, the Local Arrangements Chair, Karen Decker, the Finance Chair, Ed Price, the Sponsorship Chair, Maribeth Gandy, the Panels Chair, and Mashhour Solh, the Webmaster. We highly appreciate the support of the ICST staff, particularly Zita Rozsa; without Zita, this conference would not have been possible. Last but not least, we are also grateful to the IMMERSCOM Steering Committee, chaired by Imrich Chlamtac who has been very helpful in advising on early choices in planning the conference and has continued his wonderful support to all our organizing activities.

We are grateful to the support we received from Create-Net and ICST. We thank ACM SIGMM for the in-cooperation technical support. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Microsoft Research to make it possible to recognize the rising stars among the students who submitted papers to IMMERSCOM through the Student Travel Grants. We thank all the five journals that showed interest in considering accepted papers for publication at their journals: ACM Computers in Entertainment Magazine, the Advances in Multimedia journal, the Signal, Image, and Video Processing journal, the Advances in Human-Computer Interaction journal, and the ACM/Springer Wireless Networks journal.

The Conference will be held at the Montresor Hotel Tower, which is located only 13km from Downtown Verona, Italy. A first glimpse of the city is love at first sight, and will entice you to explore it thoroughly. Recently awarded the status of a "World Heritage Site", Verona’s center has delighted painters, poets, and travelers for centuries. Beside Verona's historical centre, the clear waters and adjacent olive groves of Lake Garda are just a few kilometers away. Verona’s area is full of places that deserve a prolonged visit: The Scaligeri castles, Monte Baldo, the Valpolicella, the Regional Nature Park of Lessinia, the Amphitheatre Roman Theatre, Ponte Pietra, and the Arco dei Gavi, to name a few. We hope you enjoy the conference and Verona.

Prof. Murat Kunt EFPL	Prof. Ghassan Alregib Georgia Tech