New Department, Editors, and Awards

I’m pleased to introduce new editorial board members Bernd Froehlich and Mark Livingston, who will be the editors of the upcoming Spatial Interfaces department. Bernd Froehlich is a full professor on the media faculty at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His group performs basic and applied research in multiuser virtual reality; 2D and 3D user interfaces; visualization and rendering algorithms for very large image, volume, and CAD datasets; and information visualization of static and dynamic layered graphs. Froehlich has a PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Braunschweig. He’s a cofounder of the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces and received the 2008 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award. Mark Livingston is a research scientist in the Information Technology Division at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Since 2007, he has led the Virtual Environments and Visualization research group. He directs and conducts research on interactive graphics, including augmented reality, virtual environments, visualization, and visual analytics, focusing on user interfaces, human factors, and applications. Livingston has a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he focused on tracking and user interfaces for augmented reality systems and helped develop augmented reality systems for intraoperative ultrasound and laparoscopic visualization. Livingston is secretary of the executive committee of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee, a member emeritus of the steering committee for the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, and a cochair of the SPIE Visualization and Data Analysis conference. His work on depth perception and X-ray vision in augmented reality led to an Alan Berman Research Publication Award at NRL in 2003 and an Honorable Mention for Best Paper at IEEE Virtual Reality 2006. Spatial Interfaces will focus on interactive interfaces and displays that enable or involve approaches beyond the typical desktop interface. The department will cover topics such as virtual environments; augmented and mixed reality; and multitouch, tangible, and mobile computing interfaces. Contributions describing how to incorporate novel hardware, new methods for using existing or traditional I/O devices, interface performance measurements, and applications that drive the need for such interfaces are all welcome. Bernd and Mark strongly encourage an emphasis on lessons learned from practical experience.