The 3D research community is at a potentially revolutionary point. From one side, 3D display technology, including autostereoscopic displays, is at the verge of becoming widespread and reasonably priced. From another direction, increases in computational power – including powerful GPUs – and novel formats — including UHD-3D — allow for an ever-increasing realism in 3D scene generation and display. 3D audio is now often tightly integrated with 3D environments. Haptic systems are also being tightly integrated within 3D systems. Quality evaluation of 3D systems itself is of great importance, and is also showing fast progress. Finally, new depth cameras, coupled with new 3D analysis and synthesis algorithms, are close to enable commercial-quality 3D rendering of real scenes, instead of being restricted to synthetic scenes as in the past.

All these factors together create the “perfect storm”: an environment prone for an explosion of related technology and applications, with a speed of development that will not fit in the (slower) cycle of traditional conferences and journals. In other words, while appropriate venues for presenting research at advanced stages is plentiful, the 3D Multimedia community lacks an appropriate venue for receiving feedback during early or initial stages of the development of radical or potentially disruptive technology. This is exactly the void that Hot3D tries to fill. After the enormous success of the previous Hot3D in Singapore (2010), Barcelona (2011), Melbourne (2012), San Jose (2013), Chengdu (2014), Torino(2015), 2016 is again expected to represent a premier venue, providing an environment for lively discussion of early-stage, potentially disruptive research.