I spent lunchtime with Leandro Agrò and Flavio de Paoli in a nice Oktoberfest resembling steak house in Bicocca, the uber-modern quarter built in the ex-Pirelli factory area, chatting about new-born babies and the lacks of modern digital compact cameras.

The last minute meeting was set up in order to evaluate the Milano-Bicocca University conference room that’s planned to host this year edition of “The Interaction Frontiers” (you can find the 2005 site, with speakers – including Dirk Knemeyer – bio, abstracts and slides here), which will be the main UXnet Italy event for the current year.

The event is planned to be held on June 16 from 9am to 4pm and will be about

The traditional GUI windows [that] are now enriched by simul-human symbolic representations (avatars), have input devices and sensors capable of collecting emotion rich informations and finally come out from their screens and walk on their own wheels and robot legs.

This year conference room will have seats for 150/200 people, Wi-Fi + plugs will be provided for free to all the attendees and bloggers, so remember to bring your laptop!
Learning from the LIFT06 experience the first 4 seat rows will be reserved to people without computer as the famous laptop free zone.

We plan to have a world renown geek as keynote speaker and a bright minded researcher specialised in emotion capable machines (I’m sorry but cannot be more precise at this stage) plus a top class panel of User Experience/HCI experts and a bunch of great speakers. We have some 15mins speaking slots still available and will open a call for papers once the conference site will be ready (a couple of weeks or so).

I’m really excited to be involved in the organization of such a cuttin edge event which – by the way – will be provided FOR FREE to all. If curious you can find photo details of the conference spaces on Leandro’s Flickr set.