Organizers

• Emilia Barakova, e.i.barakova@tue.nl
• Tilde Bekker, m.m.bekker@tue.nl
• Janienke Sturm, j.sturm@tue.nl

Advancements in technology determine several trends in today's society that pose serious threats to social interaction. At present, more people interact through media and less in a face-to-face manner. Another trend is that people lead less active lifestyles. At the same time, new technologies provide novel entertainment and interaction opportunities. We aim to combine these trends and explore the opportunities that technology-driven physical play offers for enhancing and stimulating real social interaction (as opposed to virtual interaction through a computer). This can be beneficial for diverse reasons: For children to counter the trend of playing computer games and watching television on their own, for elderly to socialize more when making new contacts becomes more difficult and for autistic children because they particularly like technological toys. The main goal of the workshop is to share information and experiences among researchers in the area of social interaction through physical play. We invite position papers addressing social and physical issues including (but not restricted to) the following fields:

• Social robotics
• Design for diverse user groups, such as children and elderly
• Social games
• Creative toolkits
• Exertion interfaces
• Pervasive and head-up games
• Embodied facilitation
• Spatial and tangible interaction

Paper contributions should be submitted by email to one of the organizers. Papers should be 4-6 pages in PDF format LNCS style. Contributions will be reviewed by an international program committee. Accepted papers will be included in the workshop notes (with ISBN number), distributed at the workshop, and published on the workshop's web site. The organizing committee intends to organize a special issue in an international journal. Workshop participants are required to also register for the main conference.

Program Committee

• Nadia Berthouze, University College London, UK
• Adrian David Cheok, National University of Singapore
• Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Hertfordshire, UK
• Berry Eggen, TU/e, The Netherlands
• Loe Feijs, TU/e, The Netherlands
• Newton Fernando, National University of Singapore
• Ole Sejer Iversen, University of Aarhus, Denmark
• Narcis Peres, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
• Matthias Rauterberg, TU/e, The Netherlands
• Ben Robins, University of Hertfordshire, UK

Important dates

September 1, 2008: Deadline paper submission

September 22, 2008: Notification of acceptance

September 29, 2008: Deadline final version

October 22, 2008: Workshop