Welcome to  Cross-Surface 2016, the third international workshop on interacting with multi-device ecologies “in the wild”. This workshop is co-located with the 2016 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS 2016), which is taking place from November 6 to 9 in Niagara Falls, Canada.

In this third instance of the workshop, we will review and discuss open issues, technical challenges and conceptual models for multi-device spatial or proxemic interaction. We aim to bring together researchers, students and practitioners working on technical infrastructures, studies and designs of spatial interfaces, or domain specific multi-device applications that use space as a unit of analysis. We focus specifically on analysing how such interfaces, tools and tracking technology can be deployed “in the wild”. The workshop will facilitate knowledge exchange about the current state of spatial and proxemic interactive systems, identify application domains and enabling technologies for cross-surface interactions in the wild, and establish a research community to develop effective strategies for successful design of cross-device interactions.

Different from previous years, workshop papers will be published in the ACM library. We will solicit position papers of up to 7 pages in the ACM SIGCHI Extended Abstracts Format  that describes original research and outline a person’s interest and experience in the topic of the workshop. Selected papers will serve as introductions for discussions and will be made available to the participants on the workshop website. Submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee based on originality and relevance and selected papers will be made available on the workshop website beforehand. Participants will be invited to submit an extended full article of their submission for a special issue on “Interaction with Device Ecologies in the Wild” in the Personal and Ubiquitous Computing journal that will appear summer 2017.