Contemporary interactive systems often center design around discrete user actions and interface responses. While effective for tasks, this focus can overlook how experience is shaped through perceptual conditions such as light, sound, airflow, temperature, and material presence. This pictorial presents Reduced Perceptual Cues (RPC) as a research-through-design method that shifts attention from interaction events toward the deliberate selection and composition of perceptual cues.

More-than-human design asks us to attend to non-human lifeworlds, yet human perception is overwhelmingly visual, making it difficult to engage with sensory realities unlike our own. Inspired by the star-nosed mole—a creature that navigates entirely through touch—we designed FeltSight, a mixed-reality wearable system that shifts the user's perceptual priority from vision to touch. The system pairs a visually-reduced MR headset with custom vibrotactile haptic gloves, suppressing visual dominance while extending tactile sensitivity beyond the skin, so that users encounter their surroundings through active, pre-contact probing rather than passive observation. This sensory inversion induces somatic defamiliarization, drawing on Haraway's “tentacular thinking” to invite users to approximate a tactile-first umwelt. We conceptualize this novel form of interaction as Touch Beyond Reach. Previously exhibited as an interactive artwork, this pictorial details the design process and implementation of the system.

Previous research shows how animacy attribution is shaped by perceptual and cognitive processes based on morphological and behavioural characteristics. Existing evidence is largely focused on passive observation of movement on a screen or scenarios involving predefined interactions. We explore cognitive animacy perceptions of 19 participants during embodied engagement with a spatial-scale kinetic origami surface with no defined interaction modalities. In a mixed-methods study, we collected EEG data, Godspeed Questionnaire evaluations, videos of participants engaging with the surface and semi-structured interviews to understand participants' experiences. Our results show individuals' animacy perceptions are constructed through complex, embodied meaning-making processes, affected by artifacts' morpho-behavioural traits as well as individuals' actions and interpretations. However, widespread brain activations make it hard to pinpoint to specific neurological phenomena. We unpack intrinsic and extrinsic factors shaping animacy perception, articulate the importance of ambiguity in the design of animate' objects and present application scenarios for our prototype.

We present ROomBOT, a novel concept of intelligent and embodied space where the room itself functions as an assistive robotic interface. Most prior research on intelligent spaces has focused on context sensing and home automation, lacking embodied capabilities for directly manipulating everyday physical objects such as books, blankets, and tables. To address this gap, ROomBOT actuates suspended robotic end-effectors that can move the entire room via ceiling-mounted winches, enabling extension of the user’s physical capabilities within the room. This enables assistive scenarios such as allowing wheelchair users to access objects placed at high locations or enabling bedridden individuals to retrieve a water bottle without leaving their bed, transforming ordinary rooms into assistive environments. We propose the interaction concept and design space of ROomBOT, emphasizing safety considerations for real-world deployment, and demonstrate its potential as a dynamic spatial interface that seamlessly augments daily human activities through a range of application scenarios.

We present SonicSlate, a walkable flat-panel speaker interface designed for embodied sound interaction. This low-cost, easy-to-install system integrates conventional modular flooring mechanics, layering auditory information across a space by transmitting sound and vibrations directly from the floor to the body. Unlike traditional 3D audio setups that rely on large or intrusive speaker arrays, SonicSlate delivers an immersive auditory experience without visible hardware, seamlessly extending across rooms through modular flooring. Beyond the interface itself, we explore the interaction design space of SonicSlate, developing a proof-of-concept prototype embedded with a matrix of flat-panel speakers. We provide a brief technical evaluation of the prototype’s spatial audio capabilities and outline unique use cases enabled by its design. We demonstrate how walkable sound interfaces open up new possibilities for spatialized audio experiences that are inherently physical, scalable, and unobtrusive. By integrating sound into floor materials, SonicSlate creates new opportunities for embodied interaction.

Design reflects the human tendency to adapt to and inhabit surroundings, with architectural decisions significantly shaping behavioral and cognitive experiences. This pictorial focuses on the floor as a primary, embodied interface in space. To explore its influence, five floor design typologies (completing, switching, zoning, stimulating, and bending) were identified through twenty hours of expert discussions involving architects, designers, an artist, an engineer, and researchers. A collaborative workshop further defined sub-categories via participatory observations. Fieldwork then informed site selection for an observational study, which confirmed the behavioral and cognitive impacts of the identified typologies. Based on these findings, floor codes were developed by shifting the design focus from visual cues to somatic sensations and applied in design scenarios. This research contributes to understanding human experience in architectural environments. It offers insights for virtual architecture, proposing evidence-based strategies for designing personalized and interactive spaces in virtual and mixed-reality contexts.

Human environments are physically supported by floors, which prevent people and furniture from gravitational pull. Since our body motions continuously generate vibrations and loads that propagate into the ground, measurement of these expressive signals leads to unobtrusive activity sensing. In this study, we present Flexel, a modular floor interface for room-scale tactile sensing. By paving a room with floor interfaces, our system can immediately begin to infer touch locations, track user locations, recognize foot gestures, and detect object locations. Through a series of exploratory studies, we determined the preferable hardware design that adheres to construction conventions, as well as the optimal sensor density that mediates the trade-off between cost and performance. We summarize our findings into design guidelines that are generalizable to other floor interfaces. Finally, we provide example applications for room-scale tactile sensing enabled by our Flexel system.

We propose inDepth, a novel system that enables force-based interaction with objects beyond a physical barrier by using scalable force sensor modules. inDepth transforms a physical barrier (eg. glass showcase or 3D display) to a tangible input interface that enables users to interact with objects out of reach, by applying finger pressure on the barrier’s surface. To achieve this interaction, our system tracks the applied force as a directional vector by using three force sensors installed underneath the barrier. Meanwhile, our force-to-depth conversion algorithm translates force intensity into a spatial position along its direction beyond the barrier. Finally, the system executes various operations on objects in that position based on the type of application. In this paper, we introduce inDepth concept and its design space. We also demonstrate example applications, including selecting items in showcases and manipulating 3D rendered models.

Conventional swept-volume displays can provide accurate physical cues for depth perception. However, the corresponding texture reproduction does not have high quality because such displays employ high-speed projectors with low bit-depth and low resolution. In this study, to address the limitation of swept-volume displays while retaining their advantages, a novel swept-volume three-dimensional (3D) display is proposed by incorporating physical materials as screens. Physical materials such as wool, felt, and so on are directly used for reproducing textures on a displayed 3D surface. Furthermore, we introduce the adaptive pattern generation based on real-time viewpoint tracking to perform the hidden-surface removal. Our algorithm leverages the ray-tracing concept and can run at high speed on GPU.

SCALE provides a framework for load data from distributed load-sensitive modules for exploring force-based interaction. Force conveys not only the force vector itself but also rich information about activities, including way of touching, object location and body motion. Our system captures these interactions on a single pipeline of load data processing. Furthermore, we have expanded the interaction area from a flat 2D surface to 3D volume by building a mathematical framework, which enables us to capture the vertical height of a touch point. These technical invention opens broad applications, including general shape capturing and motion recognition. We have packaged the framework into a physical prototyping kit, and conducted a workshop with product designers to evaluate our system in practical scenarios.

A computer display that is sufficiently realistic such that the difference between a presented image and a real object cannot be discerned is in high demand in a wide range of fields, such as entertainment, digital signage, and design industry. To achieve such a level of reality, it is essential to reproduce the three-dimensional (3D) shape and material appearances simultaneously; however, to date, developing a display that can satisfy both conditions has been difficult. To address this problem, we propose a system that places physical elements at desired locations to create a visual image that is perceivable by the naked eye. This configuration can be realized by exploiting characteristics of human visual perception. Humans perceive light modulation as perfectly steady light if the modulation rate is sufficiently high. Therefore, if high-speed spatially varying illumination is projected to the actuated physical elements possessing various appearances at the desired timing, a realistic visual image that can be transformed dynamically by simply modifying the lighting pattern can be obtained. We call the proposed display technology Phyxel. This paper describes the proposed configuration and required performance for Phyxel. We also demonstrate three applications: dynamic stop motion, a layered 3D display, and shape mixture.