Recent advances in multimedia focus on aspects of personalization in order to enhance user experience, product uniqueness, and special requirements. Although Industry 4.0 enabled mass customization, this has not been adequate to satisfy personalization demands for different verticals. The fifth industrial revolution (Industry 5.0) significantly focuses on improving and integrating aspects of personalization into the industrial environment in order to customize for requirements of consumers. This industrial revolution relies on the development of mobile computing and high-speed communication technologies to meet the increasing demand for multimedia services and applications. Emerging technologies, such as mobile TV, 3D video, 360-degree video, multi-view video, free-viewpoint video, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR), have received significant interest from both academia and industry. These technologies are widely expected to provide exciting services and applications for monitoring, entertaining, training, and operating in the areas of smart home, smart city, public safety, healthcare, education, manufacturing, transportation, etc.

However, there are currently many unresolved issues in research to develop multimedia systems which could potentially affect many domains, including mobile computing, context-aware computing, human-computer interaction, cybernetics, cyber-physical human systems (CPHS), and information security and privacy. One such issue is the high delay-sensitivity of the two-way communication between user devices and content providers in mobile interactive multimedia system. Thus, latency modeling and evaluation are critical to system architecture design and resource allocation. As many mobile multimedia applications are location-related, research on real-time location-aware computing and context-aware computing becomes important in the development of mobile multimedia systems. Moreover, new networking and computing technologies, such as social networks, software-defined networks, edge and fog computing, and content-centric networking are expected to have great impact on the design of mobile multimedia systems. For example, to reduce latency for AR/VR applications, software on edge computing servers can provide local object tracking and local AR/VR content caching. In addition, trust and privacy issues are very important to users as malicious applications could deceive users by taking advantage of interactivity and providing false content.

This Special Issue invites leading research experts from industry and academia to present their original research and review articles on novel methodologies, applications, standards, and protocols for multimedia methodology and applications in the industry 5.0 era. We hope that this Special Issue helps to identify promising directions and future trends for those seeking to contribute to multimedia methodology and applications in the industry 5.0 era.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Architecture, algorithms, and applications of next-generation multimedia systems
• Interactive multimedia and AR/VR in the industry 5.0 era
• Multimedia networking, streaming, and computing in the industry 5.0 era
• Multimedia for the internet of things (IoT) and 3D mobile multimedia in the industry 5.0 era
• Current and potential applications of multimedia for the industry 5.0 era
• Multimedia techniques for human-centered cyber-physical systems (CPS) in the industry 5.0 era
• Security and privacy of multimedia schemes for the industry 5.0 era
• Artificial intelligence and big data analytics for multimedia applications for the industry 5.0 era
• Combination of IoT and big data analytics for multimedia communication systems in avoiding/solving various disaster scenarios for the industry 5.0 era
• Demonstration of real-world use cases for multimedia applications for the industry 5.0 era