ISMAR 2015

Important Deadlines

Paper submission deadline: 15 March 2015
Authors receive reviews: 1 May 2015
Authors’ rebuttal due: 10 May 2015
Author notification of First Review Cycle: 1 June 2015
Revised paper submission for Second Review Cycle: 24 June 2015
Final acceptance notification: 4 July 2015
Cameraready version due: 10 July 2015

Please note the additional short Second Review Cycle. This accommodates changes requested for Short or Full Papers. All accepted Full Papers will be published in a special issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). All Short Papers will be published in the ISMAR proceedings. Additionally, all papers are made available via IEEE Xplore.

Papers

Full Papers must be 8-10 pages long, Short Papers are up to 6 pages. There is no distinction between Full and Short Papers in terms of the expected quality; a similar level of contribution per page is expected. Material simultaneously submitted to ISMAR 2015 and another venue will be rejected without review.

Papers are also eligible for one of a number of best paper awards. ISMAR has an established reputation of awarding prizes to papers with future high impact
(http://arnetminer.org/bestpaper).

Examples of topics appropriate for a presentation in fewer pages are:

A focused research result that can be completely described and justified in fewer than 8 pages.
A compelling case study.
A novel concept or application that does not have the level of implementation and evaluation expected of a 10-page paper.

Posters

Posters have a separate submission deadline. Details will be available on the ISMAR homepage.

Submission Rules

Papers must be written in English.
Submissions must not be under review by any other conference, journal or other publication venue during ISMAR's reviewing period, and must not be previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere. This includes publications that have previously appeared in languages other than English. ISMAR actively searches for duplicate submissions by exchanging author and title lists with other conferences and journals. Such submissions will be rejected without review, and the coordinators of the duplicate submission will be notified.
Papers must be strictly formatted according to the submission guidelines and submitted electronically as PDF documents. ISMAR uses a single-blind reviewing process (see FAQ below). Thus, authors and affiliations may be mentioned.
Authors may include supplementary materials (such as a video) with the submission, and such materials are highly encouraged if they provide evidence of the claimed contribution. Videos should not be longer than five minutes, and the total size of all submitted materials (including the PDF document) must be under 50MB; but, 100MB can be granted if requested by authors. If you include a video, also include a text file describing what codec you used to create the video. Videos must be playable on VLC. If you require a special codec make certain that you include instructions on how to find and install that codec. If the reviewers cannot play your video file, it may reduce the chances of your submission being accepted.
The submission must include all information necessary to evaluate the paper and must not ask reviewers to go to web sites or other external information sources, since that might circumvent page and media format limits, and may jeopardize the anonymity of the reviewers. Such external sites will not be accessed during the review process.
For accepted papers, at least one author must register for the conference and present the work. If no author is fully registered by the camera-ready submission deadline, the accepted work will be withdrawn from publication.

Submission Process

Paper templates (TeX, doc) are available here:
http://ismar.vgtc.org/ismar/2015/info/call-participation/submission-guidelines

All materials will be submitted electronically through the Precision Conference website at:
https://www.precisionconference.com/~ismar/

If you already have an account with that system, please use that account to submit your materials. Otherwise, create a new account. As part of the submission you will be able to choose a major topic and a list of associated keywords.

After Submission

After your submission the following process takes place:

The submission will be reviewed by the Program Committee and external reviewers.
After all reviews are in, authors can see the reviews and write a short rebuttal to clarify questions or errors in the reviews.
Based on the reviews and the rebuttal, the Program Committee will make decisions. A first notification will be provided and authors must revise their paper and undergo a second short review cycle. Accepted Full Papers will be published in a special journal issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG).
A final notification for papers will follow, and if accepted, a camera-ready version must be submitted.
Papers will have to be presented by at least one of the authors at the conference.

Reviewing Process

ISMAR is a high-quality conference with a competitive submission process. In 2013, ISMAR accepted only 25.2% of the papers submitted. For information on past conferences including acceptance rates and best paper awards see the http://ismar.net website.

ISMAR has a rigorous reviewing process that is similar to the processes used by ACM SIGGRAPH and ACM UIST. Every submitted paper is subjected to this process.

Reviewing: We have two tiers of reviewers: the Program Committee and a pool of reviewers. Each paper is assigned to a member of the Program Committee, and that person will procure at least three reviews from the reviewers or additional external reviewers, in addition to providing a meta review.

Papers: Full Papers are from eight to ten pages, and Short Papers are up to six pages in length. They must describe a novel contribution to the field and provide the evaluations necessary to prove the claims of the contribution. See the section below, “Writing a good ISMAR paper,” for more guidelines. However, these are only hints; the final merit of a paper will be determined by the reviewers and the Program Committee.

Rebuttals: After all reviews are in, the website will be open for authors to read their reviews and provide a short rebuttal (up to 500 words). The purpose of the rebuttal is to correct factual errors in the review or clarify questions raised in the reviews. No new material, results, or data may be included in the rebuttal. Any such information will be deleted. After the rebuttal period, the assigned Program Committee member will prepare a recommendation for the PC meeting, taking into account reviews, rebuttal, and any further discussion by the reviewers.

Then the Program Committee and Program Chairs will meet to discuss the papers and determine which to accept.

Best paper awards are selected by an independent committee from the accepted papers. Criteria for selection include the grading obtained through the reviews, the novelty of the work, and the quality of the presentation.

Also see the Reviewing Guidelines for more information.

Accepted Papers

If your submission is accepted, the following steps are required:

Submit a camera-ready copy for the proceedings. Please take the recommendations from the reviews into account when preparing the final version.
At least one author must register with the conference before the camera-ready submission deadline to present the work and ensure that it is included in the proceedings.

Camera Ready

Upload the final version to the same site you submitted your original paper by July 10th, 2015 at https://www.precisionconference.com/~ismar/

Use the "Final Submission Form" to provide your final version and any supplementary material such as video files.

In the preparation of the final submission, follow the formatting and submission guidelines here:

http://ismar.vgtc.org/ismar/2015/info/call-participation/submission-guidelines

Ensure that you are using the correct formatting and submit the IEEE copyright form. Otherwise, your contribution might not be included in the proceedings

Presentations

Presentations of accepted papers will be normally assigned an oral session, however if a significant number of high quality papers is accepted, some papers may be presented more suitably in an interactive poster-like session. More details will be provided at the time of acceptance.

Oral presentations should be between 15-20 min. maximum. There will be an additional 5 min. for questions and handover between the presentations. Please use the break before your session to meet your session chair and test your equipment. In addition, all paper presenters have an opportunity to show their demonstration in the ISMAR conference.

Writing a good ISMAR paper

A good ISMAR submission will result in both a respectable document for the proceedings and a good conference talk. As an author, you should ask yourself the following questions before writing your paper. Submissions that do not provide good answers to these questions are unlikely to be accepted.

What problem are you addressing?

The most common motivation for publishing a paper is to present a solution to a problem. When doing so, try to state all your constraints and assumptions. This is an area where it can be invaluable to have someone who is not intimately familiar with your work read the paper. Include a crisp description of the problem in the abstract and try to suggest it in the title. The choice of Program Committee member assigned to the paper is based almost entirely on these items.

ISMAR papers often focus on a certain aspect of Mixed and Augmented Reality systems. The following list includes some example topics, but does not represent an exhaustive list of all topics. We welcome any new idea beyond the usual range of areas.

Interaction Methods: Does the paper propose a novel interaction method? Does it present different use cases and applications for it? Can it demonstrate that the method performs better than other known ones?

User Interface & Human Factors: Does the paper describe how Mixed and Augmented Reality is improving a user interface design, human task performance or perception?

Tracking and Pose Estimation: Does the paper describe a novel method that is more robust in difficult conditions (lighting, outdoor, fast motion)? Is it a new, clever combination of different sensors? Does it provide more information for use in interaction and rendering?

Rendering and Visualization: Does the paper describe a novel, improved method for realistic integration of virtual graphics into a mixed scene? Is it faster or more accurate than known methods? Does it present a novel way of presenting information about the real world?

Displays and Input devices: Does the paper describe a novel display (e.g., visual or aural)? Does it describe a novel input device that provides different input modalities, is easier to use and deploy or more precise?

Applications: Is the paper proposing a new application of Mixed and Augmented Reality in a specific domain? Are you providing a new understanding of usage patterns and social behavior of a deployed AR application?

What were the previous approaches?

What are the relevant published works in your problem area? What deficiencies in their approaches are you trying to overcome? How does the new approach differ from previously published results? Don't expect the reviewers to know this information without your telling them in the paper, as they are unlikely to remember the precise details of all the relevant literature. Make specific comparisons between your work and that described in the references; don't just compile a list of vaguely related papers.

How well did you address your stated problem?

Based on your problem statement, what did you accomplish? You are responsible for proving that the problem is sufficiently addressed. Include pictures, statistics, or whatever is required to make your case. If you find this part of the paper difficult to write, perhaps the work is not yet finished and the paper should be deferred until next year.

The following describes some typical evaluations methods for different kinds of papers. This list is not exhaustive, but provides some hints as to what can help to present your contribution.

Interaction Methods: How usable is the method or system? What is the performance of users (e.g. completion time, error rate, learning curve) compared to a previous interface developed for a similar task?

User Interface & Human Factors: Is the improvement or effect described well supported through evaluations? Was the experimental design appropriate to your solution? Were sample size, statistical evaluation, and presentation and conclusions appropriate?

Tracking and Pose Estimation: How robust is your system? Can it deal with difficult input including light conditions, fast motion, occlusions? How fast is it and on which hardware? How does it compare to known state-of-the-art systems? It is also a good idea to use a standard data set to make the results comparable to other publications, or make your test data sets available for other authors.

Rendering and Visualization: Is the output quality of your system superior to previous methods? Is it faster or capable to operate at real-time rates? What hardware and sensors does it require? For visualization, what use cases does it cover? What amount or complexity of data can it deal with?

Displays and Input devices: What are the performance specifications of the display? For example, for a visual display does it work in indoor/outdoor, strong light conditions, what is the field of view, and is it multi-user capable? What is the hardware/software required to recreate it? What are the specifications of the input device? Can it be used in a mobile setting?

Applications: How did you design the system, what was the input from the application domain? Was the system tested by end users in the application domain? Did it improve their performance? Did it create new opportunities to improve the work methods?

What does this work contribute to the field?

What are your new ideas or results? If you don't have at least one new idea, you don't have a publishable paper. Can your results be applied anywhere outside of your project? If not, the paper is probably too special-purpose for ISMAR. On the other hand, beware of trying to write a paper with too large a scope.

Is the paper complete?

The question that generates a large amount of discussion at the Program Committee meeting is whether a paper is complete. If the paper presents an algorithm or technique, an experienced practitioner in the field should be able to implement it using the paper and its references. If the paper claims to present a faster or more efficient way of implementing an established technique, it must contain enough detail to redo the experiment on competing implementations. When you quote numbers, be sure that they are not misleading—state clearly whether they were measured, simulated, or derived, and how you did the measurements, simulations, or derivations. For example, CPU time measurements are meaningless unless the reader is told the machine and configuration on which they were obtained.

Does the paper contain too much information?

Many large, poorly written papers contain a good paper trying to get out. It is the author's responsibility, not the reviewer's, to discover this paper and turn it into the submission. If you have addressed a single, practical problem, don't try to generalize it for the purposes of publication. If you have a formal theory or elaborate architecture, don't include all the vagaries of the implementation unless they are critical to the utility of the theory. Don't include the contents of your user's manual; instead, describe the model or functionality achieved. You should assume your audience has a working knowledge of user-interface development and access to the major journals in computer science, electrical engineering, and psychology. A short conference paper can only present a few concise ideas well.

Can this paper be presented well?

While ISMAR papers are judged primarily as technical papers, some consideration is given to how suitable the topic is for a conference presentation. Think of how you would present your ideas, and how big the audience is likely to be. Papers that have a small number of concisely stated new ideas and that are visually interesting tend to appeal to a large audience and be easy to present. As recent conferences clearly show, these criteria do not eliminate papers that have taxonomies or strong theoretical content, or appeal to a specialized audience, if they contain significant new ideas.

Further Examples

You can also find the full list of papers previously published at ISMAR in the IEEE Xplore. Furthermore, the ismar.net website lists past best paper awards, which are good examples of great ISMAR papers.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Is ISMAR a visual tracking conference?

No. While ISMAR has helped to bring to the world key works on real time 3D tracking using vision methods, Mixed and Augmented Reality are concepts that go far beyond tracking in 3D!

At ISMAR 2015 we are highlighting the interest in work that goes beyond tracking. Issues on usefulness of AR, learning, training, therapy, rehabilitation, virtual analytics, entertainment, context, behaviour and object recognition together with other wearable sensors using computer vision, sensor networks and new types of onboard and external sensing technologies become very relevant to augment beyond boundaries.

Can a Full Paper at ISMAR 2015 be accepted to the conference but not the TVCG special issue?

No. All Full Papers accepted to ISMAR have to be revised and published in the TVCG special issue.

Can a paper be submitted anonymously ie as if it was sent for a double blind review?

Yes. Authors can decide to be anonymous and remove any reference to their identities on the paper and video materials. See below,

Why is ISMAR single blind, is that not bad practice?

Other conferences have moved to be double blind. Here are some reasons why ISMAR thinks single blind is not as bad as some may think.

First of all your Program and Area Chairs vow to:

Treat all submissions and authors equally without any preferential treatment to anybody. This we are proud to think has been the case since the start of the series.
Be fanatical about enforcing singleblind reviewing anonymity so reviewers and area chairs can provide their best academic judgement in the knowledge that it will be anonymous.

Double Blind Submissions require more work to create and can be awkward to read: The authors have to go over the paper and remove anything that identifies themselves. This also includes any video that they submit. This can sometimes go to extremes, such as authors disguising their voices or shooting videos with concealed backgrounds to avoid revealing what laboratory the work was conducted in. This is in general wasted research time.

A small breach of anonymity could result in outright rejection: Or in wasted effort by the PC to try to anonymise things on behalf of authors. In other conferences, any sign of the ID of the author could waste a year worth of work as it results in outright rejection.

Anonymous submissions are harder to review: The authors have to remove references to their own work. That means that a reviewer will have a more difficult time determining what is new about this submission compared to previous work. That burden is then transferred to the Area Chairs or even Program Chairs, and this is unnecessary additional work.

Single-blind reviews are difficult enough: Keeping single-blind anonymity is difficult enough, especially when Area Chairs and Program Chairs are potentially authors.

So how do you ensure fair reviews then? As per the vow above, we will take extreme care to ensure that no prejudice is used and only the quality of the work determines acceptance. The Program Chairs and Area Chairs will monitor reviews and the live discussions to ensure this is the case. Also, in the case that an Area Chair or a Program Chair is an author of a submitted paper, these will be handled by a chair that is not them (one reason why we have 3 Program Chairs!), but also reviewers assigned to these papers will be asked to create fake names and emails so that no author knows who is reviewing their paper. Anyone with a conflict of interest with the paper being reviewed (author, close collaborator of author, etc.) leaves the room before any discussion happens.

Document History

This document was adapted by Walterio Mayol, Christian Sandor, and Rob Lindeman, based on significant materials created by Ron Azuma on how to write a successful ISMAR paper and how to be a successful Program Chair, also based on the 2011 UIST Author Guidelines edited by Maneesh Agrawala and Scott Klemmer (using material provided by Saul Greenberg), who inherited it from François Guimbretière, who inherited it from Michel BeaudouinLafon, who inherited it from Ravin Balakrishnan and Chia Shen, who inherited it from Ken Hinckley and Pierre Wellner, who inherited it from Dan Olsen, who inherited it from Steve Feiner, who inherited it from Joe Konstan, who inherited it from Michel BeaudouinLafon, who inherited it from Ari Rapkin, who inherited it from Beth Mynatt, who inherited it from George Robertson, who inherited it from Marc H. Brown, who inherited it from George Robertson, who got lots of help on it from Steve Feiner, Brad Myers, Jock Mackinlay, Mark Green, Randy Pausch, Pierre Wellner, and Beth Mynatt.

142

Main

Calls

Committees

Supporters and Media

Social Media

Previous Years

Author Guidelines