Registration Opens For 'Immersive Worlds' Conference

Officials from Brock University St. Catharines in Ontario have announced that registration has opened for the upcoming Interacting with Immersive Worlds Conference, a two day event that is set to take place at the university on June 4-5. The event will focus on the “growing cultural importance of interactive media,” and will include a keynote presentation by Silicon Knights' president Denis Dyack. The event will also host a number of panels devoted the application of virtual worlds in education and entertainment, as well as a brad look at the immersive qualities offered by these types of applications. Other speakers scheduled for the conference include MIT Media Lab's Chris Csikszentmihalyi, 'What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy' author James Paul Gee, and 'flow' theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Particularly notable sessions scheduled for the event include Erin Hoffman's “Warrior Queens of the Cyberworld: How Massively Multiplayer Online Teams Gravitate toward Female Leads,” David Owen's “The Narrative Web of Mimetic Desire in Second Life,” and Jennifer Martin's “Creativity from Code: Resisting and Subverting the Limits of World of Warcraft.” For more information on the event, including registration details and more detailed session information, visit the official website.