ISS

We are very happy to welcome you to the 2018 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces, held November 25-28, 2018 in Tokyo, Japan. As the 13th event in an annual series starting in 2006, ACM ISS (formerly known as ACM ITS) is the premier venue for research addressing the design, development, and use of new and emerging digital surfaces, interactive spaces, and multi-surface technologies. 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.

The vibrant city of Tokyo, Japan is currently undergoing a massive construction boom that is seeing the rapid introduction of new ISS technologies (media facades, touchscreen kiosks, interactive vending machines, etc.) into the city landscape in preparation for hosting the 2020 Summer Olympics. Japanese developers are aggressively pursuing new ways to integrate digital/interactive technologies into the built environment. Academics and practitioners in spatial design disciplines (architecture, urban design, etc.) are showing increasing interest in collaborating with engineers/scientists, and a new generation of design firms specializing in providing tailored ISS solutions have appeared as well. This is all happening in the broader context of a country with deep traditions of art and culture, and we hope conference participants will find this setting ideal for contemplating how this exciting field of research will shape and integrate into the world in the years to come.

Sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and generously supported by Sony CSL, Tateisi Science and Technology Foundation, Rakuten Institute of Technology, Autodesk, Information Services International-Dentsu, Ltd. (iSiD), NUITEQ, and Yahoo! Japan, the conference brings together a multidisciplinary group of researchers and innovators from around the world. As ever, our main goal is to provide an engaging and high-quality program. The program features a strong selection of papers devoted both to pure research and to concrete applications. The conference received 105 paper submissions, of which 28 were selected, leading to an acceptance rate of 26.7%. Each submission underwent a rigorous peer review. They were assessed by a program committee consisting of 35 senior experts and by 154 external reviewers. The accepted papers reflect the variety of topics and perspectives that comprise the ISS community, ranging from multi-touch surfaces and interactive 3D spaces to interactive water displays and novel interaction modalities. The conference also includes an exhilarating demo session, comprising 21 interactive demonstrations. The program further includes 18 interactive posters that provide an opportunity for the ISS community to discuss late-breaking work. Finally, 2 pre-conference workshops will enable focused work to advance cutting-edge topics and a doctoral consortium will provide valuable, personalized feedback to student researchers.

We are especially pleased to have two exciting keynote speakers. Dan Hill, Associate Director of the global design and engineering firm, Arup, will give the opening keynote. His talk focuses on insights he has gained as Director of the Arup Digital Studio, a multidisciplinary interaction design and service design team at the intersection of design, urbanism, and technology. The closing keynote will be given by Seiichi Saito, Director of the global design firm, Rhizomatiks, which fosters collaboration between media art, industry, and business. His talk focuses on his experiences in the commercial art field and developing three-dimensional, interactive spaces.

The 10-Year Impact Award recognizes influential research published at our previous conferences. This year the award goes to Mark Hancock, Thomas ten Cate, and Sheelagh Carpendale for their paper entitled "Sticky tools: full 6DOF force-based interaction for multi-touch tables". Their contribution to ITS 2009, describes a new interaction paradigm that uses multitouch and bimanual touch interaction on a two-dimensional surface (i.e. an interactive tabletop) to enable six degrees of freedom (6FOF) manipulation of virtual three-dimensional objects in a virtual scene. This concept is realized through sticky tools that include sticky fingers that enable moving, spinning, and lifting virtual objects using multi-touch interaction, opposable thumbs that enables object flipping using bimanual interaction, and, finally, virtual tools that enable behavior propagation to other virtual objects in a scene.

Sticky tools provided the ISS, HCI, and broader virtual reality design communities a much-needed set of tools, and generalizable interaction design concepts for a growing interest in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality interactive systems. This research continues to influence research within the ISS community, which maintains a strong interest in 3D interaction design. It has also been adopted, adapted, and extended by a broad range of researchers in the HCI, Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality, and Multimedia computing fields, and has influenced practical application development across a wide variety of domains, including behavioral therapy, games and entertainment, education, and art and culture. We are confident that the foundational interaction design concepts described in this paper will continue to influence research within ISS and beyond for years to come.