OFFIS - INSTITUTE FOR IT

September 22.-23.2026

SPP2199 Closing Symposium

Six years of scaling interaction. One last room to share it in.

Every project, every prototype, every late-night debugging session across the priority programme comes together for two days in Oldenburg — to present, to argue, to celebrate, and to say a proper goodbye to SPP 2199.

Please register here.

You built this field. Come close it out.

When SPP 2199 started, “scalable interaction” was a question mark. Since then, this community has turned it into GAZE trackers, illusionary surfaces, privacy-preserving gestures, and a dozen other answers nobody else was brave enough to chase.

The Closing Symposium is where all of that finally sits in one room. Not a status update — a celebration. Two days of lightning talks, hard questions from people who actually understand your work, career workshops from folks who’ve been exactly where you are, and enough coffee breaks to catch up with everyone you’ve missed since the last retreat.

Bring your latest results, your unfinished ideas, and your best conference-hallway opinions. We saved the good seats for you.

The full program

Two days, four lightning-talk blocks, two rounds of career workshops, and a send-off worth showing up for.

Tuesday, September 22nd

0900 – Welcome and Keynote by Joanna McGrenere (University of British Columbia)

1030 – Coffee Break

1100 – Lightning Talks and Interactive Project Presentations 1

  • Aesthetics of Performative Interaction – Who Else Is Watching? UX in Public Interactive Systems
  • Beyond Safety and Efficiency in Acute Care – Pervasive Interaction in Acute Care: Balancing Safety and Experience
  • PervaSafe Computing – Pattern-based Wearable Control Room Assistants
  • Scalable Pervasive Health Environments
  • PerforM/TransforM – The room intelligence – interaction paradigms for personality and transparency in smart spaces and beyond

1230 – Lunch

1400 – Career Development Workshops

  • How to DFG by Florentin Neumann (DFG)
  • How to Become an HCI Professor by Susanne Boll (University of Oldenburg) and Florian Michahelles (TU Vienna)

1530 – Coffee Break

1600 – Lightning Talks and Interactive Project Presentations 2

  • Designing and Evaluating Scalable Behavioral Biometrics Systems for Pervasive Computing Environments
  • Illusionary Surfaces – Feeling What Isn’t There: Multisensory Illusions for Pervasive Interfaces
  • PervaSafe Computing 2 – From Places to Spaces of Control
  • RIME – Enchanted Interaction: Materials as Interfaces in Smart Homes

1900 – Social Event

Wednesday, September 23rd

0900 – Lightning Talks and Interactive Project Presentations 3

  • GAZE – Scalable Gaze Interaction for Pervasive Environments
  • Manipulation of Virtual Self-Perception – Feeling the Virtual Bodies: Haptics Meets Avatar Embodiment
  • PriMR – Design and evaluation of scalable user interfaces for communication and control of data protection aspects in mixed reality
  • SKIRIM – Self-directed kinetic interaction with rich interactive materials 

1030 – Coffee Break

1100 – Career Development Workshops

  • Life after PhD by Florian Alt (LMU Munich), Enrico Rukzio (Ulm University), and Teresa Hirzle (University of Copenhagen)
  • How to Grant Proposal by Jochen Meyer (OFFIS – Institute for IT), in German only

1230 – Lunch

1400 – Lightning Talks and Interactive Project Presentations 4

  • GrIPSs – Waving Consistently: Gesture Design for Pervasive Environments
  • User Interaction Concepts based on Prehensile Hand Behavior
  • Privacy-preserving interaction with body-worn computing devices – Rethinking Privacy in On-Body Computing
  • SimGest – Simulation of scalable gesture-based human-machine interaction
  • Compensation for Inter-Sensory Discomfort in Real-Time – When Illusions Break: Detecting Discomfort in Mixed Reality

1530 – Coffee Break

1600 – Closing Keynote by Florian Michahelles (TU Vienna)

1730 – Closing Reception

This is the room where “scalable interaction” stops being a proposal and becomes a memory worth having.

Come for the talks. Stay for the hallway conversations, the workshop advice you’ll actually use, and the reception where everyone finally admits which project they were most nervous to present.