Prof. Dr. Anton Nijholt Appointed Founding Editor-in-Chief of Virtual Worlds

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Anton Nijholt has been appointed founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Virtual Worlds (ISSN: 2813-2084).

Prof. Dr. Anton Nijholt is a professor of computer science and he has held positions at various universities inside and outside the Netherlands. In 1989, he was appointed full professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, where he initiated its Human Media Interaction group, for which he currently acts as a visiting scholar. He has been a research fellow at McMaster University, Canada, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. For some years he was a scientific advisor for Philips Research Europe, Eindhoven. His current research interests are augmented reality, virtual agents, and multimodal interaction with a focus on social and playful interfaces. Prof. Dr. Nijholt, together with many of the fifty Ph.D. students he has supervised, has written numerous journal and conference papers on these topics and he has acted as program chair and general chair of the main large international conferences on entertainment computing, virtual agents, affective computing, faces and gestures, multimodal interaction, computer animation, and brain–computer interfaces. Presently, he is exploring those topics in the context of extended reality environments.

The following is a short Q&A with Prof. Dr. Anton Nijholt, who shared with us his vision for the journal in addition to his views on the research area and open access publishing:

The journal is new, and with an expert editorial staff, it is possible to help direct high-quality research in the field of extended reality (XR), its applications, and its social impact.

There is immense interest in augmented and virtual reality. We must ensure that this does not lead to hype such as we have seen in earlier years with AI, which then led to an “AI Winter”. This field of research is too important for that. The journal offers the opportunity to stimulate XR research that moves from the purely technical approach of XR to one that embeds XR in a broader field of research of ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence, sensory augmentation, and human–computer interaction. It should be open to multidisciplinary approaches, and attention must be paid to societal problems that may arise from XR applications.

XR technology will make it possible and useful to switch between the different XR worlds that we have at our disposal during our everyday activities (professional, at home, recreational). The research will have to focus on developing XR technology that makes switching smooth and self-evident. This certainly requires further development of multisensory XR technology and its embedding in ubiquitous computing.

It is remarkable that it took so long before free access to publicly funded research became a matter of course. We must prevent this model from giving scientists, for example, from low-income countries, fewer opportunities to publish, or from restricting scientists’ freedom of publication due to coming under the financial control of their institutes and universities.

We warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Anton Nijholt in his new role as founding Editor-in-Chief, and we look forward to him leading Virtual Worlds and helping the journal achieve many milestones.