Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces

We are pleased to host the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS) 2009, to be held on November 23--25, 2009, in Banff, Alberta, Canada. ITS 2009 is the 4th event in a series of annual research workshops that began in 2006 in Adelaide, Australia as "Tabletop", and has subsequently traveled around the world (Tabletop 2007 in Newport, RI, USA; Tabletop and Interactive Surfaces (TIS) 2008 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and has also broadened in scope beyond its original focus on horizontal computer systems. Based on the overwhelming success of the previous workshops, ITS 2009 has moved to a conference status under the sponsorship of the Academic Computing Machinery (ACM) professional association, and will now have its proceedings archived in the ACM digital library. ITS is a premier venue for presenting research in the design and use of new and emerging tabletop and interactive surface technologies. As a new community, we embrace the growth of the discipline in a wide variety of areas, including innovations in ITS hardware, software, interaction design, and studies expanding our understanding of design considerations of ITS technologies and of their applications in modern society. We believe this year's technical program reflects this broad scope. In these proceedings you will find contributions from both academia and industry from across the world, including 22 full papers and 7 notes. This year's program reflects both continued innovation of interactive surface technologies and a maturation of the technology toward support real-world individual and collaborative activities. The program features topics that expand the limits of current interactive surface capabilities, including exciting new hardware platforms that enable more sophisticated and nuanced user input, innovative interaction techniques that enable more complex interaction with application data and functionality, and use case examples of interactive tabletop and surface applications developed to support different usage scenarios.