Thermal Painting is a probe to explore multisensory painting, aiming to defamiliarize, or present the familiar creative practice of painting in an unfamiliar way for artists. The system provides dynamic thermal feedback based on what color the artist is painting. In a qualitative, exploratory pilot study with 20 artists, we investigated how thermal sensations influenced their creative process. Artists described how thermal feedback impacted color selection, brush movements, comfort and flow, thematic associations, and memory triggers. This prompts plans for future work around design improvements, an in-situ field study, thermal associations, and multisensory defamiliarization. This project offers preliminary insights into the interplay of thermal sensation and creative process.

This pictorial helps expand thermal interaction design toward more situated experiences in everyday life. First, we map existing thermal display applications and techniques, identifying an under-explored niche of thermal displays that rapidly change temperature (fast-switching) without touching the body (non-contact). Second, we explore this niche with scenarios showing everyday interaction possibilities, including Candlelit Dinner, Calming Compact Mirror, Social Foot Bath, Fried Ice Cream, Thermal Painting, and VR Diwali, among others. Finally, our discussion contributes design directions regarding heat as a design material, personalized thermal comfort in shared settings, cultural and emotional associations with heat in everyday contexts, and facial thermal interactions. Overall, this pictorial contributes to designing for everyday thermal experiences.

ABSTRACT

The human brain’s plasticity allows for the integration of artificial body parts into the human body. Leveraging this, embodied systems realize intuitive interactions with the environment. We introduce a novel concept: embodied swarm robots. Swarm robots constitute a collective of robots working in harmony to achieve a common objective, in our case, serving as functional body parts. Embodied swarm robots can dynamically alter their shape, density, and the correspondences between body parts and individual robots. We contribute an investigation of the influence on embodiment of swarm robot-specific factors derived from these characteristics, focusing on a hand. Our paper is the first to examine these factors through virtual reality (VR) and real-world robot studies to provide essential design considerations and applications of embodied swarm robots. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identified a system configuration to achieve the embodiment of swarm robots.

We control the temperature of materials in everyday interactions, recognizing temperature’s important influence on our bodies, minds, and experiences. However, thermal feedback is an under-explored modality in human-computer interaction partly due to its limited temporal (slow) and spatial (small-area and non-moving) capabilities. We introduce hydroptical thermal feedback, a spatial thermal feedback method that works by applying visible lights on body parts in water. Through physical measurements and psychophysical experiments, our results show: (1) Humans perceive thermal sensations when visible lights are cast on the skin under water, and perceived warmth is greater for lights with shorter wavelengths, (2) temporal capabilities, (3) apparent motion (spatial) of warmth and coolness sensations, and (4) hydroptical thermal feedback can support the perceptual illusion that the water itself is warmer. We propose applications, including virtual reality (VR), shared water experiences, and therapies. Overall, this paper contributes hydroptical thermal feedback as a novel method, empirical results demonstrating its unique capabilities, proposed applications, and design recommendations for using hydroptical thermal feedback. Our method introduces controlled, spatial thermal perceptions to water experiences.