ACM ISS began in 2006 as the IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems. Its focus was on interactive tabletops, and wow were they great! The touch sensing, the fluidity and immediacy, the sensing of real objects, the glorious pixels! Everything was locked in to create some of most amazing interactions we had ever seen. As new sensing and display technologies have appeared, our community has grown to include interaction beyond the tabletop, figuratively and literally. In this talk I will muse on some of the trends that have shaped our community, and present-day trends that will change us further. Throughout all this, can we identify the aspects of our work that keep us coming back to the area, the things that really matter to us? We can try!

Andy Wilson is a partner research manager at Microsoft Research. There he has been applying sensing technologies to enable new modes of human-computer interaction. These days he is focused on interactive multimodal systems, generative AI techniques to create virtual worlds, ubiquitous computing, and mixed reality. He helped bring the original Surface interactive table to life, and contributed to Microsoft’s earliest efforts to commercialize depth cameras, leading to Kinect. Before joining Microsoft, Andy obtained his BA at Cornell University, and MS and PhD at the MIT Media Laboratory. In 2007 he co-chaired the IEEE International Workshop on Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems, the predecessor to today’s ACM ISS conference series.