ACM international conference on virtual reality continuum and its applications (VRCIA) is biannually sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH, and in cooperation with the Eurographics Association, Chinese Society of Image and Graphics, and INI-GraphicsNet. The conference is devoted to the technical aspects and applied areas of virtual reality continuum, covering from the real environment through augmented reality and augmented virtuality to the virtual environment. ACM VRCIA 2006 is aimed to provide a forum for the scientists, researchers, developers, and users in the international VRC community to share experiences, exchange ideas, and disseminate knowledge of this fast-growing multidisciplinary field. Among the forty regular technical papers accepted at the conference, five of them ranked on the top of reviews list by IPC committee are selected and further extended for the special issue of VRCIA 2006.
The parallel-culling paper by H. Xiong, H. Peng, A. Qin, and J. Shi addresses efficient parallel occlusion culling on cluster of GPUs systematically. Based on the occlusion-culling algorithm they proposed, different strategies of paralleling the occlusion culling on the GPUs cluster are developed and experimented for the high-resolution tiled display wall. The soft-touch deformations paper by H. Chen, H. Sun, and X. Jin proposes the interactive haptic deformation approach incorporating the dynamic simulation of mass-spring systems and flexible control of free-form deformation in the touch-enabled soft object manipulation. Through the distribution of physical properties, special effects can be intuitively created through the soft-touch interactions, letting the objects move in a dynamic, cartoon-style deforming approach. The ICWall paper by T.v.d. Schaaf, M. Koutek, D.M. Germans, and H.E. Bal describes their alignment/calibration method for the construction of the ICWall stereo tiled display using an automated approach. The alignment error can be reduced by applying sub-pixel accurate localization and modeling of the projector lenses. The large stereo system they developed on tiled display has been used for visualization of medical datasets and immersive VR presentations. The collision-detection paper by S.K. Wong and G. Baciu proposes robust continuous collision detection in the simulation of meshed deformable surfaces. A primitive filter layer is embedded in the pipeline of continuous collision detection to extract the potentially interacting primitive pairs. Interactive rates can be achieved for complex deformable surfaces with large contact regions in a cloth simulation system. The 3D user interfaces paper by M. Green and W.L. Lee presents the