Interactive Surface Environments : Design and Implementation This dissertation presents three studies on the design and implementation of interactive surface environments. It puts forward approaches to engineering interactive surface prototypes using prevailing methodologies and technologies. The scholarly findings from each study have been condensed into academic manuscripts which are conferred herewith. The first study identifies a communication gap between engineers of interactive surface systems (i.e. originators of concepts) and future developers. To bridge the gap it explores a UML based framework to establish a formal syntax for modeling hardware middleware and software of interactive surface prototypes. The proposed framework targets models as end products towards enabling a shared view of research prototypes thereby facilitating dialogue between concept originators and future developers. The second study positions itself to support developers with an open source solution for exploiting 3D point clouds for interactive tabletop applications using CPU architectures. Given dense 3D point cloud representations of tabletop environments the study aims toward mitigating high computational effort by segmenting candidate interaction regions as a preprocessing step. The study contributes a robust open source solution for reducing computational costs when leveraging 3D point clouds for interactive tabletop applications. The solution itself is flexible and adaptable to variable interactive surface applications. The third study contributes an archetypal concept for integrating mobile devices as active components in augmented tabletop surfaces. With emphasis on transparent development trails the study demonstrates the utility of the open source tool developed in the second study. In addition to leveraging 3D point clouds for real time interaction the research considers recent advances in computer vision and wireless communication to realize a modern interactive tabletop application. A robust strategy that combines spatial augmented reality point cloud based depth perception CNN based object detection and Bluetooth communication is put forward. In addition to seamless communication between adhoc mobile devices and interactive tabletop systems the archetypal concept demonstrates the benefits of preprocessing point clouds by segmenting candidate interaction regions as suggested in the second study. Collectively the studies presented in this dissertation contribute; 1—bridging the gap between originators of interactive surface concepts and future developers 2— promoting the exploration of 3D point clouds for interactive surface applications using CPU based architectures and 3—leveraging 3D point clouds together with emerging CNN based object detection and Bluetooth communication technologies to advance existing surface interaction concepts.