Guest Editors’ Introduction: Advances in Interactive Digital Entertainment Technologies (2009)

With the significant development of digital technologies in recent years, we are seeing an increasing number of applications of these technologies, in particular in the entertainment domain. They may include computer games, e-learning, high- definition and interactive TVs, and virtual environments. The development of these applications typically involves the integration of existing technologies as well as the development of new technologies. The first International Workshop on Digital Entertainment Technologies 2008 (IDET’08) was held at Lanzhou University, China, in July 2008, in conjunction with the first IEEE International Conference on Ubi-media Computing (U-Media’08). This workshop was an initial effort to review various technological issues and challenges in digital entertainments. A special emphasis was on issues that are relevant to or supporting the dynamic interactions between users and applications. This special issue collects the extended version of some of the best papers presented in IDET’08 and relevant keynote papers presented in U-Media’08. This special issue includes six papers covering some of the recent technological advances in digital entertainments. These papers can be roughly divided into three groups. The first group of two papers addresses networking issues of digital entertainments. The article by Wah and Sat (of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, U.S.A.) describes the authors’ work on real-time VoIP (voice over-IP) systems that can achieve high perceptual conversational quality. It focuses on the fundamental understanding of conversational quality and its trade-offs among the design of speech codecs and strategies for network control, playout scheduling, and loss concealments. The article by Ye, Li, and Chen (of City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) presents an adaptive algorithm called “SPF-A*” for searching multimedia files in heterogeneous mobile P2P network environments in order for these multimedia resources to be transmitted more effectively. The second group of two papers addresses content analysis issues of digital entertainments. The article by Xu, Cheng, Zhang, Zhang, and Lu (of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China) presents a generic multi-layer and multi-modal framework for sports video analysis. It first introduces mid-level audio/visual features that are able to bridge the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level understanding and then discusses emerging applications on editorial content creation and content enhancement/adaptation in sports video analysis, including event detection, sports MTV generation, automatic broadcast video generation, tactic analysis, player action recognition, virtual content insertion, and mobile sports video adaptation. The article by Don and Ivrissimtzis (of University of Durham, United Kingdom) describes the use of multiple pens to resolve ambiguity and improve usability in a sketch recognition environment. User experiments in representing drawing modes using separate colored pens demonstrate greater user understanding and less recognition errors than in a system using textual descriptions with a single pen. The last group of two papers addresses issues that are related to computer gaming in digital entertainments. The article by Cao, Glukhova, Klamma, and Renzel (of RWTH Aachen University, Germany) presents a community success model (CSM) based on the DeLone & McLean IS Success Model to measure community satisfaction. CSM combines quantitative data collected through automatic monitoring of service usage with qualitative data extracted from automatically generated questionnaires, and CSM is applied to measure the results of a regular lab course as a proof of concept. The article by Li, Zhao, Lam, and Lau (of University of Durham, United Kingdom, and City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong) presents an interactive method for simulating flexible connectors by combining dynamic constraints and impulse-based simulation. This method can be used to support interactive gaming or animation. We would like to thank a lot of people who worked behind the scene to make this special issue possible. First, we would like to thank George Sun, the Chief Executive Editor of the Journal of Multimedia, for his kind support of this special issue. Second, we would like to thank all the reviewers, including the workshop program committee members and those who helped select the papers for this special issue, for their professional reviews. Finally, we would like to thank all the authors who contributed their work to IDET 2008 and to this special issue.