This is the inaugural issue of Videre¹, a refereed, archival, on-line computer vision journal. We do not believe that the world needs yet another traditional computer vision journal. However, we do believe that our field, if it chooses, can make excellent use of capabilities available in the electronic format:

• electronic reviewing and fast publication turn-around.
• freedom from arbitrary page limits.
• color graphics.
• hypertext presentations.
• digital movies.
• data archives.
• downloadable algorithms.

In fact it is impressive to see how fast other fields, particularly those without the computer expertise that the computer vision community can boast, are developing new on-line ideas and publications. We thus launch Videre in the hope that the community will want to take advantage of these non-traditional capabilities, despite the fact that to do so may involve some unfamiliar and time-intensive effort on the part of the author.

This, the first number, does not incorporate all the features or characteristics that an electronic journal can incorporate. However, these first papers are representative in many ways of what we are indeed looking for. Terzopulos's paper has the sort of dynamic "illustrations" that are impossible in a print journal. Gang Xu's paper is basically a theoretical one with experiments on images that are now available to others in a suitable format. Papers of this kind will always be welcome in Videre. Zhang's paper also mixes theory and experiments, and provides an interactive demo to help the reader understand the practical implications of different theoretical approaches. We feel these papers provide good examples of the kinds of advantages that multimedia can add, not only to experimental papers but to theoretical ones as well.

One great advantage of the electronic format is that it is easily extensible and changable, so we solicit not only your papers but your ideas on how we can make Videre more attractive and usable by our community.

We thank Mike Swain for his invaluable help in getting Videre started: his enthusiasm, expertise and effort were crucially important.

---

Chris Brown
Giulio Sandini

Editors

________________

¹ Latin for ``to see'', probably best pronounced VID-er-ay or vi-DER-ay.