Guest EditorialSpecial Section on VECIMS 2006

B RINGING a methodical instrumentation and measurement perspective to the theory and practice of virtual and virtualized environments and human–computer interfaces by focusing on the quantitative aspect of these technologies and their interactive applications in telerobotics, remote control , engineering design, environment sensing and monitoring, training, education, the arts, and computer security is a major challenge. In this Special Section on Virtual Environments, Human– Computer Interfaces, and Measurement Systems (VECIMS), we review the current trends and latest developments in the aforementioned fields. We start with the paper by Polushin et al., where the authors address the stability problem of force-reflecting teleoperation where the communication between the master and the slave is subject to multiple time-varying discontinuities and unbounded communication delays.freedom haptic rendering of the telerobotic operation method using virtual joint coupling. In this research, the authors de-couple the rigid body dynamic simulation from the haptic thread to alleviate the computation demand by integrating a physically based simulation library Open Dynamics Engine into the proposed simulation system. In the next paper, Alamri et al. present a haptic virtual rehabilitation system with several daily life exercises. The performance analysis of the exercises within their proposed system has shown its validity and effectiveness as a diagnosis system to analyze the patients' data. Monroy et al. discuss an agent-based profiling approach in the form of a virtual interface that models user behavior and satisfaction with the objective of improving the performance of high-performance computing centers. Some experiments are carried out, and they show that modeling the user and taking user satisfaction into account help improve system performance. Pazzi et al. then address remote rendering and interactive visualization of 3-D virtual environments on wireless mobile devices. They propose an end-to-end streaming and rate control protocol as well as buffering and scheduling mechanisms to support the requirements of bandwidth-demanding multimedia systems. They also discuss their experimental setup and the performance evaluation of their proposed approach. Gueaieb and Miah discuss a mobile robot navigation technique using Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology. They place RFID tags in the 3-D space so that the lines linking their projections on the ground define the " free ways " along which robots move. This is followed by Cretu et al.'s work on neural network mapping and clustering of elastic behavior from tactile and range imaging for virtualized reality applications. The discussed composite neural architecture allows encoding of the complex force/deformation relationship …