More-than-Human (MtH) design increasingly engages biomaterials such as fungi and algae through practices of noticing, care, and decentering beyond utilitarian framings. We extend this by examining play as a situated inquiry into MtH design. Through a two-month interspecies ethnography of attempting to play alongside fungal growth, and thematic analysis of our experiences, we formulated six play potentials (PPs) that surface playful practices such as making play moves and negotiating care with unpredictable playmates at the boundaries of growth, breaching growth and being surprised by how it’s taken them up, co-making funny, mysterious traces to revisit their change in time, and taking up the challenge of remembering what growth has hidden. Our work contributes (1) an empirical account of play as a situated way of knowing with biomaterials through joyful yet sometimes risky negotiations across temporalities, agencies, and entanglements, and (2) design directions for fostering playful, relational engagements with growing biomaterials.

Walking is an essential aspect of daily life, while walking with companions offers numerous benefits. Recently developed mobile robots, through their ability to navigate challenging terrains, open new possibilities for outdoor walking companionship. Yet, little is known about how such companions shape the human walking experience. In this study, nine participants walked outdoors with a robot and later reflected on their walking experience in semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis showed that the robot influenced how participants related to it, how they managed proximity, and how their attention, control, and social presence were affected. Building on these insights, we identify five key dimensions of human–robot walking: attunement, awareness mediation, proxemics, social perception, and playful curiosity. These dimensions capture how walking with robots transforms this ordinary activity into a co-experienced practice and additionally offer concrete design implications for designing and creating more meaningful, comfortable, and socially attuned human-robot walking interactions.

This study examines fashionability in computational fashion wearables (CFWs) through the reflective accounts of ten academic researcher–designers. While wearables are often studied for technical functions, fashionability, a key to adoption and sustained use, has received less attention. Using semi-structured interviews, we captured designers’ reflections-on-action as they revisited their own prototypes and surfaced forms of tacit, practice-based knowledge that are difficult to access through conventional user studies. Reflexive thematic analysis generated five themes: Desirable Friction, Contextual and Sub-Cultural Relevance, Symbiotic Sensory Envelopes, Narrative Social Performance, and Adaptive Longevity and Circularity. These themes reposition CFWs not as seamless devices but as expressive, situated, and evolving interfaces that mediate sensory, social, and cultural experience. Our findings contribute to fashion theory and HCI by showing how designers mobilize friction, context, sensory depth, and temporality as design resources. We conclude with actionable directions for embodied prototyping, multisensory calibration, narrative staging, and modular longevity.

The more-than-human field has contributed numerous opportunities for interacting with nature, animals, plants, and microorganisms. However, few studies have examined water ecosystems. Current water-related work primarily treats water as a medium for human-centered activities, rarely positioning water as an interactive subject. Building upon prior research, we explore how to better integrate water more playfully into digital-physical interactions as an interactive subject. We designed and developed Water’s Echo, an AI-powered public installation that enables human-water communication through a playful stone-throwing dialogue. We conducted a field study at a local pond, recruiting 15 residents to participate in Water’s Echo—a playful conversational interaction. Our findings indicate that this playful dialogue approach raises participants’ awareness and understanding of surrounding aquatic environments. This research provides insights for design researchers to establish engaging water ecology interactions across cultural communities, promoting a More-than-human perspective in re-examining human-nature relationships.

Autonomous systems such as robots are permeating our daily lives increasingly every day, which are now adorned with social elements, bringing them closer to synthetic companions. While used in fields like well-being, education, guidance, and entertainment, companion robots also hold great potential for outdoor uses, particularly accompanying people in the wild with numerous potential benefits. However, current studies lack a comprehensive understanding of the possible uses, functions, and behavior of companion robots outdoors. To explore this area, we have run a co-design study consisting of 5 design workshops with 30 participants, including interaction designers, product development experts, engineers, robotics experts, and frequent forest goers. The study resulted in nine valuable design themes, transferred into five design concepts, which were then interpreted into a comprehensive design space that can be leveraged by designers and researchers in creating companion robots for the wild.

This paper presents intermediate-level knowledge in the form of a taxonomy that highlights 12 different ways in which interactive tech might support forest-related experiences that are joyful for humans. It can inspire and provide direction for designs that aim to enrich the experiential texture of forests. The taxonomy stemmed from a reflexive analysis of 104 speculative ideas produced during a year-long co-design process, where we co-experienced and creatively engaged a diverse range forests and forest-related activities with 250+ forest-goers with varied backgrounds and sensitivities. Given that breadth of forests and populations involved, our work foregrounds a rich set of design directions that set an actionable early frame for creating tech that supports joyful human-forest interplays – one that we hope will be extended and consolidated in future research, ours and others'.

Advances in mobile consumer technology, especially in smartphones, have given rise to numerous new crowdsourcing opportunities. With the miniaturization of sensors and the growing number of smartphone models containing a wide range of them, we are now capable of creating digital imitations of real-world objects using everyday mobile devices. In this study, we created four augmented reality (AR) applications utilizing LiDAR sensors that were designed for crowdsourcing the creation of such digital imitations, i.e., digital twins. A user study was undertaken where video recordings, audio recordings, point cloud, and mesh data were collected in forest settings. Each approach was evaluated in terms of the characteristics and quality of the crowdsourced data acquired, as well as the participants’ behavior and experience. Our findings demonstrate that through gamification approaches, we can influence not only the user experience but also the type and quality of the crowdsourced data. Our findings offer guidance on which gamification dynamics and interactions are best suited for several types of crowdsourcing tasks. We also show that the collection of meaningful data is not limited to specific interactions or experiences and suggest that there are multiple routes in gamification design for reaching the desired outcomes.

• The study experimentally compared the novel VR interfaces that use current state-of-the-art kinesthetic gloves as manipulation tools with the traditional controller-based VR interface in accurate 3D object manipulation. • The experiment demonstrated the strengths of finger-based multipoint interaction provided by kinesthetic gloves, in terms of task completion time, accuracy, perceived workload and user preference. • The results also revealed the advantages and disadvantages of force feedback from the gloves for 3D manipulation and demonstrated the direction of future technology improvement. One of the challenges facing virtual reality (VR) is the pursuit of efficient and natural object manipulation, required by many applications, such as computer-aided medical diagnosis, surgery planning and industrial prototyping. Current hand-based three-dimensional (3D) manipulation allows users to interact with virtual objects intuitively, enabled primarily by using motion controllers with single-point interaction. There are promising avenues to increase naturalness of interaction through kinesthetic gloves that provide finger-based multipoint interaction with force feedback. These novel gloves could have more potential for 3D object manipulation in VR, however, their practical usability in this field remains largely unexplored. This study compared the glove-based VR interfaces (with/without force feedback) with the traditional controller-based VR interface in accurate movement and rotation tasks. The results demonstrated the strengths of finger-based multipoint interaction provided by kinesthetic gloves in accurate 3D manipulation, in terms of task completion time, accuracy, perceived workload and user preference. Additionally, the experiment identified that force feedback from kinesthetic gloves surprisingly did not benefit user task performance and even negatively affected rotation accuracy. However, it was perceived as valuable for object rotation that required complicated finger movement and coordination.

• Presents a two-dimensional design space around body schema and body image for playful bodily extensions. • Details designers’ experiences creating playful bodily extensions. • Articulates practical strategies for the design of future playful bodily extensions. Interaction designers are increasingly interested in physically extending people's bodies and emerging work shows the potential of such bodily extensions for play, one example being interactive fantasy ears for the Cosplay community. We interviewed five designers of four playful bodily extensions to better understand how to design them. Based on their insights and our examination of prior work, we argue that such extensions can be characterized by the extent to which they alter the wearer's body schema and body image. We illustrate this characterization using a two-dimensional design space. We use this design space to articulate practical strategies for the design of future playful bodily extensions. Ultimately, we hope to bring more playful experiences to people's lives.

We share an emergent repository of nature-entangled methods-to-be shared, experimented with, and discussed during a conference workshop. We present them in-use, as they are in formation. We do not seek to theorise or even fully articulate these methods-to-be. Rather, to make them approachable and actionable for others by showing them not fully polished. By doing this, we advocate for increased transparency in the difficulties of creating new methods, techniques, tools, and approaches. Our contribution is threefold: we provide 1) an annotated portfolio of methods-to-be; 2) illustrative examples of how cross-pollination of these methods can enrich their situated use; and 3) a discussion of ways to further articulate the methods and deepen reflection on their roles in nature-entangled design processes.

The ongoing ecological crisis is the current biggest threat for our species. As we attempt to address the situation through policy, interventions, and education, we urgently need to understand how people encounter and relate to nature: As it is, in the world, and portrayed through different media. As an exemplary medium facilitating digital nature, this paper focuses on video games. Using first-person research methods, we report on the first author sensitising themselves to nature as a ubiquitous feature, theme, and actor in video games. They played eight nature-focused games for three months. Through auto-ethnography, close reading and “noticing” (after Tsing), we make sense of their experiences using the humanistic concept of ecological (in)congruence: We draw out the relational gap and potential meanings between real nature and its virtual equivalent. Based on these insights, we outline two design impulses for how the HCI community might approach nature—within games and beyond.

Walking is an integral part of daily human lives which also has a great influence on happiness and wellbeing. Walking with a dog companion is one of the most popular forms of recreational walking that has similar benefits. The recent development of mobile zoomorphic robots, especially robot dogs has opened up new opportunities in the landscape of walking with companions. This led us to investigate how such robots can accompany humans in walking, and how the mobility and behavior of robots in a daily-life walking scenario affect humans’ walking experience. We interviewed nine participants who took a 15–20-minute walk with a companion robot around a university campus, to understand how diverse walking behaviors of a companion robot influence their perceived experiences. We have generated four key themes through thematic analysis. They imply that affective relationalities between humans and robots can build intimacy and empathy, whereas personal space and physical proximity need to be thought carefully to ensure interaction comfort and spontaneity. Additionally, the robot influenced people’s self-reflection and social values refraining them from enjoying an unknown experience, while ambiguity in communication led to less confidence and trust.

Throughout human history, communication has evolved and diversified t hrough v arious m eans, f rom natural languages to modern forms like video and virtual reality. Now, a paradigm shift, transhumanism, is proposing the integration of machines and computers into the human body to augment individuals physically, sensorily, cognitively, and emotionally. In this pictorial, we examine “How can we approach the design of transhuman technologies for communication?” and “How might future research examine their impact on communication?” For this, we conducted co-speculation workshops to identify design opportunities, and based on them, created fictional a bstracts envisioning future research. Our work contributes a set of design speculations and a range of thought-provoking research ideas that will foster discussions about probable pitfalls and benefits of transhuman technologies in the future of communication.

The use of virtual reality (VR) has seen significant recent growth and presents opportunities for use in many domain areas. The use of head-mounted displays (HMDs) also presents unique opportunities for the implementation of audio feedback congruent with head and body movements, thus matching intuitive expectations. However, the use of audio in VR is still undervalued and there is a lack of consistency within audio-centedd research in VR. To address this shortcoming and present an overview of this area of research, we conducted a scoping review (n = 121) focusing on the use of audio in HMD-based VR and its effects on user/player experience. Results show a lack of standardisation for common measures such as pleasantness and emphasize the context-specific ability of audio to influence a variety of affective, cognitive, and motivational measures, but are mixed for presence and generally lacking for social experiences and descriptive research.

Computational wearables are redefining our presence in the world and transforming our lifestyles by engendering a seamless connection between the wearer and the worn. Despite numerous original studies on the development as well as the current advances of wearables, a systematic review from the standpoint of fashion seems to be lacking. Thus, this systematic review aimed to explore the current state of research on computational fashion in wearables’ literature in terms of the key domains, theoretical models, materials, interaction modalities, and existing gaps. To this aim, the authors built a search string based on the keywords in related topics and conducted the research using Scopus databases. As a result, a total of 4777 papers between January 1990 to August 2021 were screened and 82 research study papers finally passed the inclusion-exclusion criteria for the purpose of the review. The results display: first, computational wearables’ studies are becoming more inclined towards the aesthetic aspects of fashion wearables; second, although the functional aspects of the design processes received more attention, embodiment was the most discussed theory in the included studies; third, the extensive application of fabric implied the need for new fabrics with both smart quality and flexibility to afford aesthetic aspects; fourth, ambient data as input modalities received extensive attention in fashion wearables; fifth, kinetic output modalities as novel modes of fashion expression are becoming as prevalent as visual modalities. Finally, our findings provide a detailed overview of distinct facets of studies on computational fashion and a future research agenda for researchers and designers working on fashion and wearables.

With the parallel advancement and evolution of psycho-physiological sensors, haptics, and overall wearable computing, wearable devices have become a mainstay in everyday life. While gaming is one of the most intuitively appealing areas for using wearable devices, most gaming concepts relying on wearable devices have had only moderate success. Therefore, further knowledge is needed by game developers for innovating new gaming concepts, by wearable designers to innovate new affordances for gaming in wearables, and by gamers for seeing the possibilities of what wearables can bring to gaming. To address this research problem, we combined vignette and survey studies (N = 289) to investigate which features of wearables (integrability, wearability, modularity, sociability, programmability, bio-adaptability, audiovisuality, and embodied modality) would lead to gameful experiences. Overall, the results indicate that integrability to games, wearability, modularity, and sociability were dimensions of wearables which were most strongly connected with the expectation of a heightened game experience. The findings of the study contribute to the current understanding on the experiential value of gaming wearables, as well as providing practical guidance for gaming wearables designers and marketers.

The advancement of human-computer integration as a research field promises to introduce transhumanistic ways of communicating through the enhanced abilities of augmented humans. Our work seeks to illuminate this experiential landscape, exploring a diverse set of human augmentation technologies (HATs) for communication purposes. We investigated this topic through four co-speculation workshops focusing on physical, cognitive, sensory and emotional augmentations with 35 participants. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of the workshop data, we outlined eight HAT speculations for transhuman communication, grouped into four overarching augmentation clusters: (1) Bodily Changes in/for Communication, (2) Communication with Transferrable and Collective Beings, (3) Communication through Emotion and Memory, and (4) Communication with Augmented/Altered Perception. By serving as a foundation for discussions on transhumanism and communication in CSCW and beyond, these speculations contribute to a design space highlighting design opportunities and challenges to developing and researching near-future communication technologies.

Here we present an exploration into the playful potential of forests and how interactive tech might respond to it. Through first-person, speculative, and situated generative design methods, we engaged with a range of forestry activities to explore their capacity to afford experiences based on joy and care. An analysis of our 16 trips to the forest (and the reflections they motivated) revealed 13 play potentials [6] of human-forest interactions: 13 aspects of forestry experiences that can be intrinsically joyful. We present them clustered as 5 overarching directions that can guide the design of technology that pays more attention to nature's inherent playful character. Our work can inspire a new wave of forest technology that transcends techno-solutionism and privileges alternative values of joy and care.

Recent research calls for new design methods and tools that respond to the idiosyncrasies of emergent design spaces. Here we address one of them: the design of nature-related technology. To facilitate increasingly situated practices in this space, we created the Wild Probes: a set of probing tools for displacing co-design into the wilderness. Our toolkit enables forestry future-making by helping forest goers to pay attention to, reflect on, ideate around, and document their forestry experiences. Here we present the design and early use of the toolkit. We hope other designers will find it useful and extend it with new Wild Probes of their own.

Interactive technologies offer novel opportunities for physically extending our bodies, with the most prominent examples being prosthetics along with systems emerging from the wearables community. However, most such systems appear to focus on instrumental benefits, missing out on the opportunity to use bodily extensions for play and its associated benefits (including a lower adoption barrier and the potential to reveal a broader understanding of such technologies). To begin understanding the design of playful bodily extensions, we interviewed five designers of bodily extensions that have been showcased in prestigious academic venues or turned into commercial products. Here we present themes and actionable advice from these interviews for the design of playful bodily extensions through a thematic analysis. Our work aims to support the design of future playful bodily extensions while promoting the experiential qualities of bodily extension design, with the ultimate goal of bringing more playful experiences to people’s lives.

In recent years, extended reality (XR) technology has seen a rise in use in environmental subjects, i.e., climate change or biodiversity loss, as a potential tool to inform and engage the public with current and future environmental issues. However, research on the potential of XR technology for environmental sustainability is still in the early stages, and there is no clear synthesis of the methods studied in this field. To provide a clearer view of existing approaches and research objectives, we systematically reviewed current literature dealing with XR use in environmental topics. Although the results indicate that the volume of literature exploring XR in environmental applications is increasing, empirical evidence of its impact is limited, hindering the possibility of presently drawing significant conclusions on its potential benefits. Based on our analyses, we identified thematic, theoretical, and methodological knowledge gaps and provide a guideline to aid future research in the field.

Engaging with nature enriches people’s life greatly, and it is a particularly powerful wellbeing activity. Unsurprisingly, researchers in HCI and beyond seek to augment and extend the relationship people have with nature through technology, to positively enhance their health as a result. In this paper, we report on a scoping review that examines research exploring health, nature, and technology research. By charting 29 papers from the last five years, we produce a situated snapshot of the current research landscape and identify three trends within the paper pool: Despite the potential for rich, experiential engagements, human-nature interaction is often understood as an endeavour that is 1) universal, 2) flattened and 3) disconnected from everyday life. We reflect on our findings to outline design opportunities for human-nature interaction that extend and re-orientate it; to design for multi-dimensional caring experiences that allow for a more-than-just-human understanding of nature.

In the realm of music we have multiple examples of successful rock stars, composers and producers who describe themselves as self-taught. This suggests there might be a demand in formal music education for learning technologies that support students’ self-propelled discovery. In this theoretical work, we explore the design space of educational music composing games that would allow students to explore and learn music theory concepts at their leisure. We designed four unique tile-based music creation games based on popular contemporary video game genres, and evaluated them from the perspectives of learning and musical expression. This study opens up new avenues in music composing game design, and offers examples of some ways in which games can be harnessed as vehicles to learn music theory and composition.

The design and development of playful wearable devices is a challenging and complicated problem. It entails not only multidisciplinary expertise but also a comprehensive understanding of player experience. There is a scarcity of evidence-based studies in current state-of-art literature that investigate general design practices and provide pragmatic design implications and suggestions based on solid user-centered research. To bridge the gap, we developed five experience prototypes based on the speculative design concepts from previous studies, and a Wizard of Oz experiment was conducted to elicit end users' feedback regarding general gaming experience as well as specific design themes in different gaming scenarios. The user experiment results were analyzed qualitatively following a rigorous thematic analysis, generating five major design implications as output. We believe this study will offer forward-looking insights to designers, developers and the research community, facilitating future work in this field.

Much work has been done on the design of both interactive narratives and food-based interaction systems, however their intersection has received little attention within the design research community. We took the relative dearth of food-based interactive storytelling systems as an opportunity to explore a compelling design space for multisensory interactive narratives, given these few systems often position people only as passive observers. We report the results of a design workshop conducted among the authors who are design researchers in interactive narratives and food-based play. In the workshop, we discussed existing works, asynchronously brainstormed new food-based interactive storytelling systems, and then reconvened to discuss our ideas. We present the portfolio of designs that arose from this workshop, and the design themes that we synthesized from the portfolio. We recommend how to position people not just as observers, but as active participants in the interactive food-based storytelling system.

Smart-jewelry design has many layers such as comfort, ergonomics, fashionability, interactivity and functionality that create a complex design process, making the form exploration challenging. Various wearable prototyping tools were developed to overcome this challenge; however, they are usually textile-based and do not target smart jewelry design. To bridge this gap, we developed Snowflakes that differentiates from existing tools by 1) allowing designers to explore different jewelry forms, 2) incorporating external materials such as leather, 3) creating form factors that fit body parts with flexible connectors. In this paper, we explain the design process of Snowflakes which is inspired by 7 design parameters (limbs, materials, grip, fastener, decoration, placement, form) extracted through the examination of non-smart jewelry. We also demonstrate three reimplementations and design concepts implemented with Snowflakes. Our exploration with Snowflakes contributes to the wearable community in terms of smart-jewelry visual expressions, interaction modalities, and merger of traditional and computational materials.

Recent studies on gaming wearables show that wearables can contribute to the gaming experience by bolstering performativity, facilitating social interaction, and accommodating distinct interaction modalities. Still, these studies focused on contexts such as role-playing, casual, or festival games. Stakeholder-oriented research that explores the integration of wearables for mainstream gaming platforms such as game consoles is scarce. To fill this gap, we have conducted an exploratory study through 6 participatory design workshops focusing on different aspects of wearables with 33 participants from different stakeholders. As a result, we have created fifteen design themes and three gaming wearable concepts that led to seven actionable design implications which can be adopted by designers and researchers for designing gaming wearables.

In this pictorial, we depict our design process on gaming wearables starting from participatory design workshops to concept creation. Wearables possess strong qualities for gaming such as performativity, sociality and interactivity. However, it is an emergent field and there is a dearth of design knowledge especially when it comes to designing wearables for mainstream gaming platforms such as game consoles. Our aim is to explore this field elaborately with a research through design approach and also clearly exemplify how our design process progressed through different phases. Our results, apart from helping wearables designers to understand critical features for mainstream gaming, will also demonstrate the techniques and methods for extracting knowledge from PD workshops and incorporating it in a conceptual design phase.

The current trends related to 'smart cities' are bringing the cityscapes of movies such as Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077 closer to our immediate reality. The question of what will the cities of the future look like is at the heart of urban studies. In parallel, a similar question is posed by (trans)humanists about the future of humanity and its possible technological enhancements. However, (trans)humanity and future cities are defined in a bi-directional dependency. Therefore, we have to answer the questions of future humans and cities simultaneously. This paper maps several ways of interacting between transhuman communities and smart cities to understand their possible effects on governing, design and society at large resulting in a framework that will work as a cautionary tale and an inspirational blueprint for imagining future urbanity.

Deployment of wearables for games has attracted the interest of designers and researchers both in academia and industry. However, few of these projects treat wearables as an integral part of the gameplay, often considering them as an extension of the central on-screen experience. While preliminary forays into wearable play show promise, we see a need for a rigorous design framework to illuminate the possibilities for the future of wearables for playful interaction design. In this paper we propose a Design Framework for Playful Wearables stemming from our extensive research and hands-on experience in leading four long-term game research projects incorporating wearables. We divide our framework into three high-level categories: the performative, the social and the interactive. We contend that this design space can be both a design tool for creators of wearable playful activities, as well as an analytical lens for evaluating existing wearable systems.

Programming has become an essential subject for today's education curriculum and as a result, the importance of creating the right environments to teach is increasing. For such environments, featuring tangible tools enhances creativity and collaboration. However, due to their high prices, current tangible tools are not reachable by most of the students. We developed Code Notes as a low-cost, attainable and tangible tool aimed to motivate children to support programming education. Code Notes is comprised of an Android app and code-cardboards to teach the basic concepts in programming. We continue to develop the platform with insights gained from children. This paper shares the design phases of Code Notes and observations from our two-month programming project. We also presented some future concepts of Code Notes that offer an active and embodied interaction with the teaching material.

We believe that wearables and movement are perfect fit for enhancing tabletop role-playing (TTRPG) experience, since they can provide embodied interaction, are perceived as character-costumes, enhance ludic properties and increase the connectedness to the imaginary game worlds. By providing these improvements, they can increase the immersiveness and player/character relationship which are critical for an ideal TTRPG experience. To investigate this underexplored area, we conducted an extensive research through design process which includes a (1) participatory design workshop with 25 participants, (2) preliminary user tests with Wizard-of-Oz and experience prototypes with 15 participants, (3) production of a new game system, wearable and tangible artifacts and (4) summative user tests for understanding the effects on experience with 16 participants. As a result of our study, we extracted design guidelines about how to integrate wearables and movement in narrative-based tabletop games and communicate how the results of each phase affected our artifacts.

Hand-specific on-skin (HSoS) gestures are a trending interaction modality yet there is a gap in the field regarding users' preferences about these gestures. Thus, we conducted a user-elicitation study collecting 957 gestures from 19 participants for 26 commands. Results indicate that (1) users use one hand as a reference object, (2) load different meanings to different parts of the hand, (3) give importance to hand-properties rather than the skin properties and (4) hands can turn into self-interfaces. Moreover, according to users' subjective evaluations, (5) exclusive gestures are less tiring than the intuitive ones. We present users' subjective evaluations regarding these and present a 33-element taxonomy to categorize them. Furthermore, we present two user-defined gesture sets; the intuitive set including users' first choices and natural-feeling gestures, and the exclusive set which includes more creative gestures indigenous to this modality. Our findings can inspire and guide designers and developers of HSoS.

We observe an increasing interest on usage of full-body interaction in games. However, human-to-human social touch interaction has not been implemented as a sophisticated gaming apparatus. To address this, we designed the Sensation, a device for detecting touch patterns between players, and introduce the game, Shape Destroy, which is a collaborative game designed to be played with social touch. To understand if usage of social touch has a meaningful contribution to the overall player experience in collaborative games we conducted a user study with 30 participants. Participants played the same game using i) the Sensation and ii) a gamepad, and completed a set of questionnaires aimed at measuring the immersion levels. As a result, the collected data and our observations indicated an increase in general, shared, ludic and affective involvement with significant differences. Thus, human-to-human touch can be considered a promising control method for collaborative physical games.