The 13th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia was held in Brisbane, Australia in September 2007. This was the first time that VSMM was sited in Australia. The Australian conference theme reflected the country’s cultural heritage, both recent and past – Exchange and Experience in Space and Place. Of the many papers submitted under this theme we were able to identify three core sub-themes: Virtual Heritage, Applied Technologies and Virtual Environments. With a truly international flavor, these sub-themes covered the diverse areas of heritage site and artifact reconstruction and analysis, Australian Aboriginal cultural heritage, training, notions of spirituality, human – computer interaction in virtual environments, 3D modelling, remote collaboration and virtual agents. This made for rich, varied and lively conference session debates. Ninety-seven papers were submitted. Of these, 56 were accepted for inclusion in the general conference proceedings. Of these, 18 were further reviewed and selected for this Springer publication. The authors of these papers were invited to revise their papers following feedback from the conference before inclusion in this volume. Many people contributed to the conference. We first wish to thank the Virtual Systems and Multimedia Society, who provided strong support to the whole process of the preparation of the conference. In particular, we would like to express our thanks to Takeo Ojika, Mario Santana Quintero and Hal Thwaites for their generous support and guidance.

Table of Contents:
Virtual Heritage.- Using a Dance Pad to Navigate through the Virtual Heritage Environment of Macquarie Lighthouse, Sydney.- 3D City Model of the Ancient Hue, Vietnam; Reconstruction of the City Environment for the Cultural Heritage Identity Conservation.- A Conversation on the Efficacies of the Game Engine to Address Notions of Sacred Space: The Digital Songlines Project and Transgressions of Sacredness.- Digital Tools for Heritage Information Management and Protection: The Need of Training.- Beyond the Map: Issues in the Design of a Virtual 3D Knowledge Space for Aboriginal Knowledge.- The Irreducible Ensemble: Place-Hampi.- Reconstructing the West Mebon Vishnu: A Marriage of Traditional Artefactual Analysis with Digital 3D Visualization.- Applied Technologies.- From Manual to Automated Optical Recognition of Ancient Coins.- Adding Semantic Annotations, Navigation Paths and Tour Guides to Existing Virtual Environments.- A View-Based Real-Time Human Action Recognition System as an Interface for Human Computer Interaction.- Knowledge Based Lacunas Detection and Segmentation for Ancient Paintings.- SmartVolumes - Adaptive Voronoi Power Diagramming for Real-Time Volumetric Design Exploration.- Virtual Environment.- Constructing a Virtual Tower of Babel: A Case Study in Cross-Cultural Collaboration Across Three Continents.- Evolutionary Virtual Agent at an Exhibition.- The Metaplastic Virtual Spaces.- Embodied Communication in the Distributed Network.- Interactive High Resolution Texture Mapping for the 3D Models of Cultural Heritages.- Prototypes for Automated Architectural 3D-Layout.