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New technical innovations in telepresence allow people to attend meetings or gather together anywhere they are and to share the same virtual space using 3D avatars. More sophisticated systems have been developed with 3D capturing and rendering, leading to a true 3D telepresence experience. If the 3D avatar is remotely guided by the real participant, it is possible to replace this real participant by his or her autonomous virtual counterpart, as an i-substitute. The i-substitute is supposed to give a partial illusion that the real person is present. This implies that the i-substitute should look the same as the real human, speak with the same intonation, and be somehow aware of the real situation, the real participants, and the task currently being performed. The i-substitute should react at the right time based on the perception he/she has from the real participants. It implies an evaluation of what each real participant is doing. Perception will be obtained by visual and audio input and recognition. The i-substitute reacts according to the input and its current knowledge; its reactions encompass animation (body and facial gestures) and speech synthesis. The i-substitute could be an autonomous virtual human as well as a social robot, depending on the type of meeting and environment. This special section contains the four best papers on this innovative topic from the 19th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2013), held by the Institute for Media Innovation, Nanyang Technological University, October 6–8, 2013 on the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) campus. These four papers have been considerably improved and expanded from the conference papers. Each extended paper has been peer reviewed carefully. The editors would like to thank the external reviewers for their careful work. In the first paper, ‘‘A United Framework for Individualized Avatar-Based Interactions,’’ Arjun Nagendran, Remo Pillat, Adam Kavanaugh, Greg Welch, and Charles Hughes propose a framework to interactively control avatars in remote environments. The system, called AMITIES, serves as the central component that connects people controlling avatars (inhabiters), various manifestations of these avatars (surrogates), and people interacting with these avatars (participants). A multi-server-client architecture, based on a low-demand network protocol, connects the participant environment(s), the inhabiter station(s), and the avatars. A human-in-theloop metaphor provides an interface for remote operation, with support for multiple inhabiters, multiple avatars, and multiple participants. Custom animation blending routines and a gesture-based interface provide inhabiters with an intuitive avatar control paradigm. This gesture control is enhanced by genres of program-controlled behaviors that can be triggered by events or inhabiter choices for individual or groups of avatars. This mixed (agency and gesture-based) control paradigm reduces the cognitive and physical loads on the inhabiter while supporting natural bi-directional conversation between participants and the virtual characters or avatar counterparts, including ones with physical manifestations, for example robotic surrogates. In the second paper, ‘‘Human–Robot Interaction by Understanding Upper Body Gestures,’’ a human–robot interaction system based on a novel combination of sensors is proposed by Yang Xiao, Zhijun Zhang, Aryel Beck, Junsong Yuan, and Daniel Thalmann. It allows one person to interact with a humanoid social robot using natural body language. The robot understands the meaning of human upper body gestures and expresses itself by using a combination of body movements, facial expressions, and verbal language. The gestures are characterized by the head, arm, and hand posture information. The wearable Immersion CyberGlove II is

Special Section: Best Papers from the 19th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2013) Guest Editors’ Introduction