International audienceThe WILD room (wall-sized interaction with large datasets) serves as a testbed for exploring the next generation of interactive systems by distributing interaction across diverse computing devices, enabling multiple users to easily and seamlessly create, share, and manipulate digital content

This paper presents a novel middleware for developing flexible interactive multi-surface applications. Using a scenariobased approach, we identify the requirements for this type of applications. We then introduce Substance, a dataoriented framework that decouples functionality from data, and Shared Substance, a middleware implemented in Substance that provides powerful sharing abstractions. We describe our implementation of two applications with Shared Substance and discuss the insights gained from these experiments. Our finding is that the combination of a dataoriented programming model with middleware support for sharing data and functionality provides a flexible, robust solution with low viscosity at both design-time and run-time.

We introduce the Digital Roll, a cylindrical hand-held device wrapped with a curved display, that can be rotated by hand to provide a continuous scrolling of text. We present design considerations for such a device and report on a preliminary experiment designed to assess its acceptance for casual reading, using a simulator. Encouraging results and their implications on the design of the device are then discussed.