After the success of the first international conference on Virtual Worlds (vw98), this second issue will confirm the growing interest of the scientific community for this new emerging field.

The terms “virtual worlds” generally refer to Virtual Reality applications or experiences. We extend the use of these terms to describe experiments that deal with the idea of synthesizing digital worlds on computers. Thus, Virtual Worlds (VW) could be defined as the study of computer programs that implement digital worlds with their own “physical” and “biological” laws. Constructing such complex artificial worlds seems to be extremely difficult to do in any sort of complete and realistic manner. Such a new discipline must benefit from a large amount of work in various fields: Virtual Reality and Advanced Computer Graphics, Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation, Simulation of Physical Systems, and more. Whereas Virtual Reality has largely concerned itself with the design of 3D immersive graphical spaces, and Artificial Life with the simulation of living organisms, Virtual Worlds is concerned by the synthesis of digital universes and virtual worlds as wholes. Besides it applications in simulation, computer games, on-line business, etc, this approach is something broader and more fundamental. Throughout the natural world, at any scale, from particles to galaxies, one can observe phenomena of great complexity. Research done in traditional sciences such as Biology and Physics has shown that components of complex systems are quite simple. It is now a crucial problem to elucidate the universal principles by which large numbers of simple components, acting together, can self-organize and produce the complexity observed in our universe. Therefore, Virtual Worlds is also concerned with the formal basis of synthetic universes. In this framework, it offers a new and promising approach for studying complexity.

This second issue of the Virtual Worlds Conference confirms the interest of the scientific community to this new trend of research and applications. Unlike the first issue, the conference is organized as a single thread. This was decided in order to catalyze discussions and information exchanges between speakers and other participants during the conference. As a consequence, the selection level was higher than two years ago and only a reduced set of the submitted papers were finally accepted. The approaches and works covered by the resulting program is rich and diverse. This ensures a very good program that will represent for all participants a stilmulating mix of ideas.