concept to meet these requirements. The implemented TUIpist framework deploys arbitrary sensor technology for any type of application and actuators in distributed environments. State of the art Interest in tangible user interfaces (TUIs) has grown constantly since the 1990s, and with every year, more tangible systems are showing up. A 2017 white paper outlines the evolution of TUIs for touch table experiences and raises new possibilities for experimentation and development. In 1999, Gary Zalewski patented a system of moveable children's blocks containing sensors and displays for teaching spelling and sentence composition. Tangible Engine is a proprietary authoring application used to build object-recognition interfaces for projected-capacitive touch tables. The Tangible Engine Media Creator allows users with little or no coding experience to quickly create TUI-based experiences. The MIT Tangible Media Group, headed by Hiroshi Ishi is continuously developing and experimenting with TUIs including many tabletop applications. The Urp system and the more advanced Augmented Urban Planning Workbench allow digital simulations of air flow, shadows, reflections, and other data based on the positions and orientations of physical models of buildings, on the table surface. Newer developments go even one step further and incorporate the third dimension by allowing a user to form landscapes with clay (Illuminating Clay) or sand (Sand Scape). Again different simulations allow the analysis of shadows, height maps, slopes and other characteristics of the interactively formable landmasses. InfrActables is a back projection collaborative table that allows interaction by using TUIs that incorporate state recognition. Adding different buttons to the TUIs enables additional functions associated to the TUIs. Newer versions of the technology can even be integrated into LC-displays by using infrared sensors behind the LC matrix. The Tangible Disaster allows the user to analyze disaster measures and simulate different kinds of disasters (fire, flood, tsunami,.) and evacuation scenarios during collaborative planning sessions. Physical objects allow positioning disasters by placing them on the interactive map and additionally tuning parameters (i.e. scale) using dials attached to them. The commercial potential of TUIs has been identified recently. The repeatedly awarded Reactable, an interactive tangible tabletop instrument, is now distributed commercially by Reactable Systems, a spinoff company of the Pompeu Fabra University, where it was developed. With the Reactable users can set up their own instrument interactively, by physically placing different objects (representing oscillators, filters, modulators...) and parametrise them by rotating and using touch-input. Microsoft is distributing its novel Windows-based platform Microsoft Surface