Along with colleagues in Microsoft and Bristol we are editing a special issue of a journal to follow on from our PPD workshop last month in Italy.

Call for Papers for Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Special Issue:
Designing Multi-touch Interaction Techniques for Coupled Public and Personal Displays
Editors: Shahram Izadi, Aaron Quigley, and Sriram Subramanian

Synopsis:
This call for papers for a special issue follows on the successful workshop held at Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 on the same topic (see http://ppd08.ucd.ie/ for workshop details). The special issue will focus on the research challenges and opportunities afforded by the combination of touch sensitive small personal input displays coupled with large touch sensitive public displays. Different touch-enabled devices rely on different types of touches (passive stylus, active stylus, fingers and tangible objects), the motivating question for this call is how do users switch between these devices and how to facilitate fluid transition from a collection of multiple displays to a single integrated multi-display environment.
Recent developments have seen the wide spread proliferation of both large shared- and small personal- interactive surfaces. Large interactive surfaces offer great potential for face-to-face work and social interaction and provide natural ways to directly manipulate virtual objects whereas small devices afford the individual a personal workspace or “scratch space” to formulate ideas before bringing them to a wider audience. Advanced visual interfaces can be built around a combination of both personal and public touch driven displays. Such computer mediated multi-device interaction between local touch-driven displays and shared public ones present a number of novel and challenging research problems.

Topics of interest to this special issue include (but are not limited to)

* Understanding the design space and identifying factors that influence Multi-touch interactions in Coupled Public and Personal Displays
* The impact of social conventions on the design of suitable interaction techniques for shared and personal displays
* Exploring interaction techniques that facilitate multi-display interfaces
* Personal displays as physical objects for the development of interaction techniques with shared multi-touch displays
* Novel interaction techniques for both personal and public multi-touch devices as part of multi-display environments
* Techniques for supporting input re-direction and distributing information between displays
* Developing evaluation strategies to cope with the complex nature of multi-display environments
* Ethnography and user studies on the use of coupled public and personal display environments
* Comprehensive surveys of the state-of-the-art that extend our understanding of the design space.

Submission details
Submissions should be between 6000 and 8000 words and authors are encouraged to use the Springer guidelines for authors, available at ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/Word/journals
Submission in pdf electronic format should be emailed to Luke Conroy (luke.conroy@ucd.ie).

Dates
4th August 2008: 300 word abstract and expression of interest (optional)
15th August 2008: Feedback on abstract
29th August 2008: Full submission due
3rd October 2008: First Notification
5th December 2008: Revisions due
9th January 2009: Final Notification
June – Dec 2009: Planned publication