Technological advances in high-speed networking and computational grids do not only transform the methods applied to everyday science, but also the collaboration and cooperation between scientists at almost arbitrary locations around the world. The additional provision of multisensory, immersive Virtual Reality interfaces as tools to improve the collaboration between groups of human users is another hot topic in this research domain, which will most likely increase the potential benefits of these distributed research communities. The vision to facilitate large scale, complex simulations, which may be steered through natural and intuitive interfaces, is both intriguing and of high scientific interest.

This session encourages paper submissions concerning the application and usage of collaborative and cooperative environments, as well as the technologies supporting them in the scientific and industrial context. Authors are expected to emphasize the benefits of their approaches for collaboration and cooperation between human users with focus on up-to-date characteristics of hard-, soft- and middleware aspects. The special session on collaborative and cooperative environments offers the possibility to discuss the different approaches in this domain, to show the latest results, products, or research prototypes to potential users, and to establish connections between developers and users of associated technologies.

The following areas and related topics are of interest:

An earlier sessions on Collaborative and Cooperative Environments have be held at the PDCS 2004, the ICCS 2005, ICCS 2006, ICCS 2007, and ICCS 2008. For further details check out:

If you are interested in this meeting, please also check out the previous ICCS technical sessions: