Editorial from the New Editor-in-Chief

Starting from the year 2000, i-com – Journal of Interactive Media has provided a platform for the human-computer interaction (HCI) research community to share ideas, observations and progress on theories, experiments and applications in various HCI topics. Special thanks go to the first (and up-to-now only) Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of i-com, Jürgen Ziegler who has spent considerable time and passion to successfully establish i-com as a respected journal in the field. Jürgen Ziegler took the job of setting up the journal and developed the journal over twenty years to the current format.

After twenty years Jürgen Ziegler has decided to pass on the job, and I am honored to serve as the new EiC of i-com. The journal has accompanied my academic live for quite some time. I had the opportunity to publish as a junior Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) researcher with my former supervisor Hans Schlichter and other colleagues from Technische Universität München (TUM) in the initial issue of i-com in 2000. Since then, I have been responsible as co-guest-editor for some special issues of i-com, have served in the editorial board as well as co-editor for now five years.

Together with my co-editors, the editorial board and the people at de Gruyter publishers, I am excited and well-prepared for continuing to run the journal. We commit ourselves to keeping the journal’s reputation and impact as an international scientific journal on Human-Computer Interaction. We aim to contribute to the whole field of HCI by publishing solid work, exploring future directions, and encouraging innovations across theory and applications. Each issue of i-com will have a special topic and guest editors who handle the contributions to this topic. You can find a list of previous and future special topics at https://i-com-journal.org. In addition to submissions to special topics, we also welcome articles that are not related to these topics. And we will continue the practitioners’ section. Special thanks go to our co-editor Sarah Diefenbach and her colleagues whose commitment has made this important i-com section possible for so many years now!

This is the first issue in the 21^st year of i-com. In this issue we present a bunch of articles that all cover the application of computer science in cultural settings. The articles bring into focus some best practice examples, challenges and future trends in the fields of mixed, extended, augmented and virtual reality. All contributions were presented during the online Conference on Culture and Computer Science 2021 (KUI 2021) – 23–24.9.2021. See the separate editorial by the Scientific Supervisors of KUI 2021. Many thanks to Johann Habakuk Israel, Christian Kassung and Jürgen Sieck for helping to select the articles and for preparing them for being published in i-com.

In addition to the articles from Culture and Computer Science, we feature extended versions of papers presented at last year’s Mensch und Computer (MuC) and DELFI conferences.

From MuC 2021 we have “Body Language of Avatars in VR Meetings as Communication Status Cue” by Marco Kurzweg and Katrin Wolf, “Dyslexia and Accessibility Guidelines – How to avoid barriers to access in public services” by Ann-Kathrin Kennecke, Daniel Wessel and Moreen Heine and “UnlockLearning – Investigating the Integration of Vocabulary Learning Tasks into the Smartphone Authentication Process” from Christina Schneegass, Sophia Sigethy, Teodora Mitrevska, Malin Eiband, Malin and Daniel Buschek. Kurzweg and Wolf address how body language cues on avatars in VR meetings can be used to indicate communication willingness. Kennecke, Wessel and Heine address how to improve the search function of websites for users with Dyslexia without making it worse for everyone else. Schneegass and colleagues look into integrating language learning tasks into authentication tasks with mobile devices.

From DELFI we have “Foreign Language Tandem Learning in Social VR. Conception, Implementation and Evaluation of the Game-Based Application Hololingo!” by Timo Ahlers, Cassandra Bumann, Ralph Kölle and Milica Lazović. The authors also address the issue of language learning – but on a more social level – by presenting Hololingo!, a social virtual reality app for real-time immersive distance language learning.

See https://dl.gi.de/handle/20.500.12116/30 for the full proceedings of MuC 2021 and DELFI 2021.

Thank you for picking up this first issue of Volume 21 of i-com – Journal of Interactive Media. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Michael Koch

(Editor-in-Chief)