UIST 2009

It is more interesting than CHI - but why? Its single-track format and very high rejection rate make the quality of contributions so good that every talk is absolutely enjoyable. The overall feeling is cozy, about 250 attendees make it possible to actually get to know people (as opposed to CHI's 2000+ attendees, which I often found to be rather a burden than a benefit). It's not a community, it's a family.

The highlights of this year's conference were Microsoft's Multitouch Mouse (Mouse 2.0: Multi-touch Meets the Mouse by
Nicolas Villar, Shahram Izadi, Dan Rosenfeld, Hrvoje Benko, John Helmes, Jonathan Westhues, Steve Hodges, Eyal Ofek, Alex Butler, Xiang Cao, Billy Chen - yes, all these authors are on the paper.) and Toshiki Sato's paper on photoelastic touch (in which they were able to determine the pressure on a transparent, tracked piece of rubber only through a specially filtered camera image). I also enjoyed Paris Smaragdis' work on 'User Guided Audio Selection from Complex Sound Mixtures', in which he showed a technique to select parts of music, playing in parallel to other parts, just by losely imitating them. The results are astounding.

Furthermore, I want to mention Chris Harrison's paper 'Abracadabra: Wireless, High-Precision, and Unpowered Finger Input for Very Small Mobile Devices' - a intriguingly simple device that is interacted with through a finger-worn magnet, of thats position the device is aware. It affords clicks, X/Y and angle-based pointing, and is - again - amazingly simple.

The 'Meatspace' track, including works on tongue-controlled computing ('Optically Sensing Tongue Gestures for Computer Input' by Scott Saponas and his colleagues) and muscle-computer interaction ('Enabling Always-Available Input with Muscle-Computer Interfaces', also by Scott Saponas et al.) pointed to interesting future implementations of 'embodied' interaction.

Ultimately, the keynotes also should be mentioned. Both, by Eric Paulos (from a very 'design-research' perspective) and by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde (a neurological perspective on the performance of magicians) were very inspiring.

It is these high-quality presentations that make UIST so worthwhile. Next year, the conference will be held in New York city, and I can't wait to start preparing my submissions.