Preface : Special Issue on Physical Movements and Playful Interaction

This Special Issue of IJART is devoted to the 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN 09). This 3rd conference was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in June 2009. It was organized by the Human Media Interaction (HMI) department of the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (ICST), Ghent (Belgium). The global theme of INTETAIN 09 was “Playful interaction, with others and with the environment". Authors were asked to contribute to this theme by focusing on intelligent computational technologies used to build interactive systems, by discussing interactive applications for entertainment, or by focusing on supporting device technologies underlying interactive systems. Previous INTETAIN conferences were held in Madonna di Campiglio (Italy) in 2005 and in Cancun (Mexico) in 2007. The 3rd conference saw the gathering of a diverse audience with broad and varied interests, with a certain focus on topics such as emergent games, exertion interfaces and embodied interaction, but it also covered important topics of the previous editions, such as, affective user interfaces, storytelling, sensors, tele-presence in entertainment, animation, edutainment, and (interactive) art. During the conference there were special activities on game design, demonstrations, and excellent invited speakers. Matthias Rauterberg of Eindhoven University, in his contribution titled “Entertainment Computing, Social Transformation and the Quantum Field", took a broad view as he discussed positive aspects of entertainment computing regarding its capacity for social transformation. Michael Mateas, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, talked about his work in interactive art and storytelling. Antonio Camurri, of InfoMus Lab, Genova, discussed an approach to Human Music Interaction that assigns a more active role to users listening to and interacting with music, in his contribution titled “Non-verbal full body emotional and social interaction: a case study on multimedia systems for active music listening'. For this special issue of IJART we invited a selection of the INTETAIN 09 authors to submit revised and extended versions of their papers. All papers had in common that they addressed physical movements in the interaction with an application. In addition to the INTETAIN 09 authors we invited a few other researchers to contribute. After an additional reviewing process we selected four papers for inclusion in this special issue. The papers that have been selected for this Special Issue cover topics such as interactive toys, open-ended play, game experience, exertion interactions, bodily interactions, shared experiences, affective interactive art, emotion visualization, and interacting with 3D game environments.