The community of the VS-GAMES covers a broad variety of facets of virtual worlds and games including game design, software engineering, computer graphics, human-computer interaction techniques, pedagogical and psychological models and evaluations. The common denominator of the conference is that all of these different efforts and perspectives target serious application domains – from museum exhibitions over deep sea robotics interfaces to training and rehabilitation. The conference was recently ranked at top 20 venues in Google Scholar ranking relevant to games. VS-GAMES has a history of more than 10 years.
The application-driven, interdisciplinary research topics presented and discussed at VS-GAMES render it a rather unique venue that promotes a dearly needed blend of technology and educational research. Given the very distinct needs and methodologies of both these great scientific fields, the conference has to ensure that the presentation and discussion of results is accessible to both audiences and still has great scientific value. It also has to serve different mindsets in terms of publications which is why, for instance, we offer post-conference invitations to the best submissions for inclusion in special journal issues which is greatly relevant especially to educational researchers.
That being said, the audience is mainly academics from all over the globe but conference typically also attracts (a few) representatives from the industry. Overall we expect a crowd of 60 to 80 participants. This year, the conference will be held at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria and is “Technically Co-Sponsored” by the IEEE Computer Society. You can find more information about the venue here.