Although interactive surfaces have been a constant topic of research during the last decades, there is still little agreement on shared infrastructures for their conception and development. While the mainstream industry has already partially integrated basic multi-touch functionality in most mobile and some desktop platforms, any further attempts of introducing commercial table-tops have been largely abandoned since. Therefore our research community that seeks to conceive and implement novel interactive tabletop concepts, often relies on the prototyping of individualized solutions or the integration and extension of openly shared community solutions.


One example of such a shared ecosystem is the TUIO protocol which has been designed to encode and transport a low-level interface abstraction within a wide variety of settings, from tangible user interfaces to multi-touch tabletops. However, our community also needs further implementations of common middle-ware solutions such as gesture-recognition or object classification as well as their integration into high-level development frameworks. Furthermore it would be also desirable to establish a shared collection of building-blocks at the hardware-level. Such a common ecosystem may not only accelerate the development efforts of our community, but should also ensure the scientific quality control through reproducible and comparable results.

Objectives

The goal for this workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners who work on standardizing and streamlining development for software and hardware interfaces in the ITS context, learn about their ongoing efforts and identify possible roadblocks to a wider adoption. We hope to initiate a small developer community in which future efforts can be planned, discussed and collaboratively developed, with a strong focus on shared standards, open source software as well as open design hardware implementations.

Call for Participation

We invite researchers & practitioners who work on protocols, frameworks, APIs and similar efforts in the realm of interactive surfaces and tangible interaction to submit position papers describing their ongoing work on these topics. Position papers should be between 2 and 4 pages in length and follow the ACM SIGCHI Extended Abstract format. A jury will select the submissions based on their connection to the workshop topic as well as their suitability for stimulating discussion and ideas for future collaboration. Accepted papers will be archived on the workshop homepage.

This workshop is of course open to a general audience in addition to the presenting authors, therefore we invite all ITS attendants who are interested in or working on open projects in the context of interactive projects to actively participate in our discussion.