Start of the new school year

September and October are two important months for kids and students. A period, following the summer time break, to see again school mates, to learn new things based on existing knowledge, to meet new teachers and friends, to start exploring new activities etc.
Looking at its calendar of related events, it seems to be alike for the virtual worlds community!

Virtual Worlds Expo kicks off on Sept. 3rd in LA. Lots of speakers, about 40 exhibitors, and many attendees. According to the schedule and to the four simultaneous sessions, focus should be on kids, VWs and other medias (TV, movies), as well as on branding and what's next (with probably quite some interesting talks on interoperability and OpenSim thanks to several key players attending there).

Serious Virtual Worlds follow closely on Sept. 11th in Coventry, UK. Christian Renaud, who recently co-edited a VW Industry Outlook, and others will also discuss interoperability including academics' insights.

Actually staying a few days (or spending the whole month?) in UK could make sense to reach Virtual Worlds Forum London starting Oct. 6th with a workshop day on 8th. Mel Guydom, head of 3D operations at Google, will talk about Lively there, among many other (80) speakers.

Chronologically last but not least, Virtual Worlds London is held Oct. 20th-21st, with Niniane Wang also involved in Google Lively, and Mark Kingdon and other executives of key companies. There's a nice initiative at the event for presenting new products and services: FastPitch.

Because of personal background, I couldn't refrain from mentioning related international conferences and workshops happening during that period as well:

• ISMAR 2008: Mixed and Augmented Reality, Sept. 15th-18th.
• SoftVis 2008: Software Visualization, Sept. 16th-17th.
• FG 2008: Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, Sept. 17th-19th.
• NetGames 2008: Network and Systems Support for Games, Oct. 21st-22nd.
• DS-RT 2008: Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications, Oct. 27th-29th.
• Cybergames 2008: Games Research and Development, Oct. 27th-30th.
• ACM Multimedia 2008: Multimedia, Oct. 27th-31st.

So, where will you go? Anyway, we should have many very interesting reports on these events to read soon!