This is not a workshop report

Niels Ole Bernsen University of southern Denmark nob@nis.sdu.dk

In relative discretion, a workshop of some potential historic significance was held recently (1-4 June 1999) at the charming Château de Bonas, some 75 kilometers west of Toulouse in the French province of Gascogne. It was the First Joint EC/NSF Advanced Research Workshop and it addressed Research Frontiers in Virtual Environments and Human-Centred Computing. Look at the topic again ... Yes! It’s close to that of much i3 research. The workshop proceedings will be published as a book later this year or early Y2K. i3magazine will keep its readers informed.

However, the thirty-some invited academic and corporate researchers from the US, Japan, India and Europe were not just tasked with presenting their visions on the field’s future to one another (and, after the usual publishing-house latency period, to readers worldwide). They were also asked to identify topics for future research which might go into a joint EC/NSF call for project proposals in the year 2000. This would provide an exciting opportunity to do i3-related work with US colleagues, from research on artificial noses sniffing in the virtual (or should it be ‘physical’?) wind, through comprehending mega-user on-line communities, to developing basic theory on human-human-system interaction (HHSI) in the upcoming Age of Content. If this actually happens the call will be published widely, of course, and i3magazine will follow up on it as well.