AI-generated future selves have been explored for self-reflection and counseling, yet most remain confined to chat, voice, or diary formats. We introduce RoF (Reminiscences of Futures), a system that enables users to encounter and converse with embodied future selves. It synthesizes voice and appearance from personal data and generates three projections of the user ten years ahead, situated within a tunnel-like installation that evokes a time-slip experience. We report the design process, stepwise judgements, and a formative study with six parent–child pairs that informed design strategies. We also present a week-long user study with fifteen participants. Participants perceived RoF as an emotionally rich experience, reporting shifts in their attitudes toward the future and deeper reflection on their present identity and life. We discuss the implications of interacting with future selves for fostering reflection and preparing positively for the future, as well as ethical issues, such as self-replication using AI.

To expand the discourse on non-utilitarian values in HCI and Design, this pictorial explores the concept of Life-Synchronized Products (LSPs), domestic technologies that align lifecycles with users. Through a co-design workshop, we developed property dimensions for products whose lifetime is associated with users. We defined LSP from properties in the dimension and exemplify LSP through ‘LO (Life-synchronized Oven),’ an oven that lives along with its user and ceases to exist upon death. LO features a visual interface, Thread of Life, reflecting lifetime and meaningful events, demonstrating physical and intelligent growth, expressing thoughts and emotions, and leaving no trace after termination. Expert interviews with our research artifacts including a semi-functional prototype, service website, and design fiction video revealed that LO can transcend traditional utilitarian roles to become “life companions” that foster existential reflection. We discuss the technical, business, and socio-ethical challenges of LSPs and implications for HCI and design research.

Peer Reviewed

As the user needs for IoT applications have grown, solutions for coordinating IoT devices in everyday living contexts are in high demand. This pictorial presents an explorative study and the design of a new IoT coordination approach that utilizes everyday objects as IoT control interfaces. We conducted a workshop study to explore the potential use cases and understand the opportunities and challenges of everyday objects as means for IoT coordination. Using the use cases from the workshop, we created a scenario movie to illustrate the user experience of the smart environment enabled by everyday objects. We also developed a functional prototype of the IoT coordination system with a wearable device that recognizes the usage of everyday objects. Based on the workshop and the design of two research artefacts, we discuss the implications for advancing the IoT ecology through the use of everyday objects and combining digital and non-digital artifacts.

Mechanical hijacking of physical interfaces is a cost-eff method for providing an Internet of Things (IoT) experience. However, existing mechanical hijacking devices (MHD) have limited applicability and usability. This pictorial introduces a research through design project on IoTIZER, which is easy to use and versatile MHD. We report on a design process from identifying a design space, conducting an iterative design and prototyping. We present the final design's hardware, software, usage scenario and implementation details. We also share lessons from a user study with eight households. The potential value of IoTIZER were appreciated as a versatile MHD. We discuss improvement areas of IoTIZER and implications for creating an IoT environment while preserving the existing conventions.

Recent subject matters of design have become complex systems involving various elements and multiple users' interactions in large-scale spaces. In addition, visualizing these complex design subjects without preparing heavy resources in the early design phases is challenging. In this paper, we present SketchStudio, a prototyping tool for generating, sharing, and reviewing an animated design scenario involving complex design subjects. The tool allows designers to define the user experience by simply creating a node graph of the user's journey over time and space. SketchStudio instantly generates unique 2.5D animated design scenarios by blending 2D sketches and 3D characters. In addition, the tool supports the virtual reality mode for immersive views of the created scenario prototype. We also report on the result of a user study with nine potential users in the design practice and education fields. Based on our tool-developing experiences as well as on the study results, we discuss possible applicable areas and points for further improvement.

Despite the advantages of instant messaging (IM) such as simple and fast messaging, IM cannot be considered as effective as face-to-face actual conversation. The current message-by-message interface shows a gap with actual conversation in terms of temporal structure and information dimension levels. Our study investigated the real-time text-displaying interface as a way of shortening this gap. A comparative user study was conducted with three types of IM interfaces to compare and analyze the duration of silence (short pause when nobody types through the IM) quantitatively. Varying chatting experiences in each IM interface were qualitatively measured through a focus group interview. We report the study results regarding the reduced duration of silence, non-verbal expression channel, and new texting techniques found in the real-time text interface. We also discuss design implications for improving the conversing experience for IM interfaces.

We present an elevating tangible block, G-raff that supports spatial interaction in a tabletop computing environment. The elevating head part of G-raff moves according to the given height and angle data. We adopted two rollable metal tape structures to create large movements with a small volume block. On the head part, a smartphone can be mounted either horizontally or vertically. G-raff becomes a device that can connect a mobile device with a tabletop computer, thus a new spatial representation and control interaction is made. This paper introduces the design details, key features and applications of G-raff. We report on the results of a preliminary user study and discuss future work to improve the elevating device. This work contributes to maximizing the availability of augmented reality space above the tabletop display.

The 3-D TV active shutter glasses (SGs) technology requires the communication of the sync timing for time-sequential frame synchronization, in contrast to the syncless film-type patterned retarder approach. To advance our previous work based on the fractional-order timer, this paper proposes a fractional-order synchronizer, including an adaptive sync reconstructor (ASR) based on FRT for syncless frame synchronization. The FRT enables accurate synchronization regardless of sync-clock speed. The hybrid cooperation of FRT and ASR reduces the required frequency of communication of the sync packets and turns off the emitter on the TV side for perfect syncless operation. The implemented one-chip solution uses less than roughly 11% of the operating current of major commercial SG. The syncless SG technique also minimizes synchronization failure and 3-D vision crosstalk from interruption in sync packets.

An field programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm is reported for blind signal separation (BSS) and adaptive noise canceling (ANC) in real time. In order to provide enormous computing power for ICA-based algorithms with multipath reverberation, a special digital processor is designed and implemented in FPGA. The chip design fully utilizes modular concept and several chips may be put together for complex applications with a large number of noise sources. Experimental results with a fabricated test board are reported for ANC only, BSS only, and simultaneous ANC/BSS, which demonstrates successful speech enhancement in real environments in real time.

A digital chip has been developed for isolated word recognition in real-world noisy environments. By carefully comparing recognition performance and hardware implementability a modified-ZCPA model and RBF neural network model are selected for the feature extractor and classifier, respectively. The modified-ZCPA model is based on the feature extraction mechanism of the human auditory system, and demonstrated superiority for noisy speech. The RBF network has excellent OOV (out-of-vocabulary) rejection capability as well as good recognition performance. Both the feature extractor and classifier are implemented by repetition of simple operations, which result in reduction of memory operations for the full use of memory bandwidth. The chip is custom designed at logic level without any DSP core, and implemented with an FPGA with 12 MHz clock speed.