Just returning from my first attendance of a UIST conference I discover that it is obviously possible to attend a single track conference without any urge to check emails during some of the talks: All of this was just very interesting.
Compared to other conferences, much of the work presented was applied, working, hands-on and relevant. The works presented were mostly interaction techniques, some generally applicable, some rather specialized. There was a considerable amount of multi-touch, table-top/surface computing/OUI work, and actually lots of prominent people.
The first day was a mixture of GUI and reality-based applications, ranging from video navigation (similar to Ramos' work in CHI08) via drag+drop, the annotation of gigapixel images and in-motion video tagging to spherical multi-touch displays (Benko), pressure-enhanced multi-touch (think of doing card tricks with virtual playing cards, by pushing one corner to slightly lift up the opposite corner, by Perceptive Pixel) and a compelling combination of multi-touch displays with a physics engine (Andy Wilson's work, which won the Best Paper Award). The most remarkable thing at this day's demo reception were the UnMousePad by Ken Perlin and his team from NYU, essentially a matrix of pressure sensors, allowing cheap (< $20) and robust multi-touch, and the SecondLight project. This allowed, through cleverly (and rapidly, at 25Hz) interchanging projection images on a multi-touch screen, that also interchanged between "frosted" and "see-through" (also at 25Hz) a second projection through the screen, which would then be visible on frosted or semi-transparent objects on the screen's surface. I hope there will be a video online soon.
On the second day, Björn Hartmann presented his work on design alternatives, basically a framework to have different variants of interactive systems next to each other, as to compare them like a product designer would do with different prototypes (Best Student Paper Award). Another highlight on this day was Inky, a command line for the web. Neat and simple, it allows for rapid emailing, calendar filling, to-do-listing, and so on, and it is also sloppy (that means, the syntax is rather loose and parsed semantically afterwards: "meeting tomorrow at 5pm at starbucks" equals "starbucks 5pm tomorrow"). Nice!
I also liked "scratch input" and "Sidesight" very much, the former allowing a mobile device listening to scratching sounds around it, and distinguishing, for instance, between different letters (scratching a "W" sounds different than a "N"). Sidesight, on the other hand, uses an array of IR proximity sensors on eac of a PDA's sides to look for fingers in the proximity, allowing multi-'touch' style gestures next to the device (without actually touching the surface).
On the third day, TaskPosé caught my attention: Think of the Mac's Exposé function, but with spring-mass-style grouped clusters of window representations, based on their 'closeness' in terms of which tasks and activities they belong to. Zoetrope is a very nice approach for time visualizations on the web, it is essentially a "Time Lens" for regions of websites, be it news headlines or numerical values (like the gas price, which is then visualized as a graph, based on numerical data collected from a particular spot on a website over time).
Furthermore, we saw a remarkable system by Chris Harrison to detect the surface a phone or laptop resides on (or in, in case of a pocket/sleeve), based on spectral analysis; the applications mentioned were sound: Asking for passwords upon wake-up in a café (but not at the desk at home), not enabling the keylock when laying on a table (but doing so quickly when put into the pocket), and so on. Nice, applied, working!
The conference ended with the academic birth hour of nonplanar, organic, foldable interaction styles, apparently the first session within this community that was considered with this topic. Johnny Lee (famous through his WiiMote hacks, as seen on YouTube) and Roel Vertegaal (who coined the term OUI, as for Organic User Interface - which origins in organic architecture) presented their ground-laying work.
UIST09: Much recommendable!