Perspectives for next generation ground- and space-based interferometers (plenary session)

The advent of large interferometric facilities such as the VLTI has recently offered the opportunity to the astronomical community to study various targets with an unprecedented angular resolution in the near- and mid-infrared. In this talk, we shortly review the main scientific topics that have largely benefited from interferometric studies in the past years, and present the future scientific challenges for interferometry. Some of these challenges will already be (partially) within reach when the second generation of VLTI instrumentation comes online, but most of them require more ambitious facilities to be built in the future. In this review talk, we recall the basic concepts of optical/IR interferometry and present some perspectives for future ground- and space-based interferometric facilities. Both approaches lead to major technological challenges that need to be overcome in the next decade.