Guest editorial: Intelligent virtual environments

From time to time, the convergence of new technologies and research communities at key points in their development provides a renewed impetus to further progress in their separate fields, to cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques with one inspiring the other, and to the emergence of new areas for research and new application areas. This is exactly what has happened with the fields of virtual environments (ol virtual reality) and artificial intelligence (and artificial life), which have recently begun to come together in a valuable and effective way