Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Companion on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (2016)

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the 2016 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2016). ISS is the premier venue for research addressing the design, development and use of new and emerging digital surfaces and multi-surface technologies. Located right at the border between Canada and the US, the scenic view of the magnificent Niagara Falls and its vibrant city life will be the ideal host for this 11th annual event in the conference series, and the first year with our new conference name. Over the years ISS has been a venue for research and applications of interactive surfaces as well as spaces, which has been acknowledged by the incorporation of 'Spaces' into our conference name for this year. Interactive Surfaces and Spaces increasingly pervade our everyday life, appearing in various sizes, shapes, and application contexts, offering a rich variety of ways to interact. Our conference is the venue to discuss all those innovations in many different areas including design, software, hardware, understanding of use, and applications or deployments of interactive surfaces and spaces.

Sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and generously supported by Microsoft, ISS brings together researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds and interest areas. Thanks to all authors submitting novel and innovative research, and the hard work of our program committee, we again have an engaging and high quality conference program. As in previous years, we kept the single track conference structure, split over four days. We had 119 submissions for the main paper track and selected 33 of them. In addition, the program covered a doctoral colloquium, workshops, tutorials, studios and posters and demos.

To recognize influential research published at our previous conferences we award the 10-Year Impact Award at ISS for the second time. This year the award goes to Meredith Ringel Morris, AJ Bernheim Brush, and Brian R. Meyers for their submission Reading revisited: Evaluating the usability of digital display surfaces for active reading tasks. Their contribution to TABLETOP'07 10 years ago addressed the much considered, but still contested, challenge of understanding the differences between reading and annotating text on paper, and reading and annotating text within digital media. The paper revisited the issue from the perspective of workplace tasks, and through a range of qualitative and quantitative studies considered a number of configurations of single and dual displays in horizontal and vertical configurations. Inevitably the conclusions were nuanced, including a set of considerations for the suitability of different set-ups for annotation, navigation, spatial management, composition, and ergonomic comfort. Ten years on and the impact of the paper is clearly seen in the many citations made to the paper by other researchers. These have come in waves of secondary studies as new reading technologies have emerged; and with the emergence of e-readers as commercial products and an increase in research on multi-device document reading and annotation, the work has genuinely stood the test of time, with citation rates actually increasing in recent years.

For the opening and closing keynotes this year we invited two excellent speakers. The conference opening keynote will be by Ali Mazalek, Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Innovation and Associate Professor in the RTA School of Media at Ryerson University. In her talk, she will provide some perspectives on the role of physical movements and materials in the way we engage with and construct knowledge in the world, highlighting research from the Synaesthetic Media Lab that supports creativity, discovery and learning across the physical and digital worlds. Camille Utterback, an internationally acclaimed artist and pioneer in the field of digital and interactive art and Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department at Stanford University, will then close the conference on the last day with her keynote on the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and physicality in visually layered ways. This will include her work ranging from interactive gallery installations, to intimate reactive sculptures, to architectural scale sitespecific works.