Conference Report: TEI 2011

This year was my third visit to the TEI conference - the "International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interfaces".

TEI is always full of work that I really enjoy. The format is a mixture of long talks (15min + 5min), short talks (5min + 5min), and a long session (usually an afternoon, or even a full day) of hands-on demos. This year, they also had a "Student Design Competition" in which students from all across the world were challenged to design a superhero costume. TEI is never boring.

The talks I enjoyed the most were "Modular Musical Objects: Towards Embodied Control Of Digital Music" by Nicolas Rasamimanana et al., "Responsible Storytelling: Communicating Research in Video Demos" by Madeline Elish, and "Interactive Fabrication: New Interfaces for Digital Fabrication" by Karl Willis, Cheng Xu, et al.

As for the demos, I really liked "An Inflatable Hemispherical Multi-Touch Display" by Andrew Stevenson and Christopher Perez, "Programmable Blobs: A Rheologic Interface for Organic Shape Design" by Akira Wakita et al., and "Designing Through Making: Exploring the Simple Haptic Design Space" by Camille Moussette and Richard Banks. The superhero costumes were great, too. I particularly enjoyed "Ahimsa" and "Captain Chronomek".

Look at some pictures here!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/14296988@N00/5388201912/

Next year, Roel Vertegaal from Queen's University Human Media Lab will be the conference chair, the conference will be held in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Ivan Poupyrev and I will be the Demo Chairs - feel free to join us!