Designing Virtual Funerals as a Design Fiction: A Film-Based Exploration of Near-Future Memorial RitualsThis paper explores the design and future potential of virtual funerals, enabling both in-person and remote participation, with options to digitally revisit and update the memorial site. While virtual funerals gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic and are often seen as temporary, the authors argue that they hold long-term value across different contexts. To investigate future funeral practices, we created a Design Fiction film depicting our concept of virtual funerals in Japan using Diegetic Prototypes–hypothetical technologies that envision a future in which these practices are normalized. Key themes include hybrid attendance, virtual memorial spaces, and technologies that bridge in-person, remote, and revisiting participants. The authors and a professional crew created the film collaboratively to illustrate these speculative elements. This paper details the film’s production, its design rationale, and the broader implications for how HCI design and technology could shape future mourning and memorialization practices.2025DUDaisuke Uriu et al.Shibaura Institute of Technology, College of Design EngineeringDesign FictionInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
PiaMuscle: Improving Piano Skill Acquisition by Cost-effectively Estimating and Visualizing Activities of Miniature Hand MusclesUnderstanding neuromusculoskeletal mechanisms significantly impacts skill specialization and proficiency. While existing methods can infer large muscle activities during gross motor movements, the estimation of dexterous motor control involving miniature muscles remains underexplored. Targeting the coordinated hand muscles in advanced piano performance, we learn spatiotemporal discrete representations of electromyography (EMG) data and hand postures utilizing a multimodal dataset. Subsequently, we train a precise and cost-effective neural network model. Based on this model, PiaMuscle is introduced to investigate if visualizing muscle activities during piano training enhances piano performance. Quantitative and qualitative results of a user study with highly skilled professional pianists demonstrate that PiaMuscle provides reliable muscle activation data to support and optimize force control. Our research underscores the potential of a naturalistic workflow to estimate small muscles' activities from readily accessible human-centric information and more accurately when combined with tool-centric data, thereby enhancing skill acquisition.2025RLRuofan Liu et al.Tokyo Institute of Technology, School of Computing; Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc.Human Pose & Activity RecognitionBiosensors & Physiological MonitoringCHI
BPCoach: Exploring Hero Drafting in Professional MOBA Tournaments via Visual AnalyticsHero drafting for multiplayer online arena (MOBA) games is crucial because drafting directly affects the outcome of a match. Both sides take turns to "ban"/"pick" a hero from a roster of approximately 100 heroes to assemble their drafting. In professional tournaments, the process becomes more complex as teams are not allowed to pick heroes used in the previous rounds with the "best-of-N" rule. Additionally, human factors including the team's familiarity with drafting and play styles are overlooked by previous studies. Meanwhile, the huge impact of patch iteration on drafting strengths in the professional tournament is of concern. To this end, we propose a visual analytics system, BPCoach, to facilitate hero drafting planning by comparing various drafting through recommendations and predictions and distilling relevant human and in-game factors. Two case studies, expert feedback, and a user study suggest that BPCoach helps determine hero drafting in a rounded and efficient manner.2024SLShiyi Liu et al.Session 4f: Multiplayer Gaming and CommunicationCSCW
Maintaining Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: A Participatory Design Process of Be.sideDuring the grieving process, physical objects often serve as catalysts for remembering and honouring the relationship with departed loved ones. Leveraging a participatory design approach, we created Be.side, a fully customisable multi-modal artefact that incorporates scent, sound, and heartbeat stimulation and acts as a touch-point between the deceased and the bereaved. We conducted a four-week study with three participants to understand how the artefact, continuously attuned to each participant, helped to continue bonds with the deceased. Our results show that Be.side’s bespoke elements helped participants to evoke memories of the deceased. Participants created personalised rituals for remembrance. They sustained bonds by not only interacting with Be.side but also participating in the research. Finally, highlighting that remembrance can both provide comfort and deepen sadness, we discuss future design considerations.2024JKJieun Kim et al.Keio University Graduate School of Media Design, Myongji UniversityHaptic WearablesShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsFood Culture & Food InteractionCHI
InflatableMod: Untethered and Reconfigurable Inflatable Modules for Tabletop-sized Pneumatic Physical InterfacesInflatable systems have been attracting attention in the field of interaction design. Conventional tabletop-sized pneumatic systems tend to be complex because they require bulky and noisy equipment. Therefore, several liquid-to-gas phase change actuators that use vaporization have been proposed. But these actuators have problems with controllability, reusability, and reconfigurability. In this study, we propose InflatableMod, novel inflatable modules based on the efficient control of liquid-to-gas phase change actuators. These are designed with a compact circuit that has a liquid transfer function to feed the required amount of low-boiling-point liquid into the pouch and a heating function to inflate the pouch by the volume change. This approach allows for a compact, silent, and untethered inflatable system. It is also possible to create an untethered and reconfigurable multi-inflatable system because each module is synchronized. In this paper, we propose the design of the modules, evaluate their performance, and present application scenarios.2023TMTakafumi Morita et al.The University of TokyoShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsCHI
HydroMod : Constructive Modules for Prototyping Hydraulic Physical InterfacesIn recent years, actuators that handle fluids such as gases and liquids have been attracting attention for their applications in soft robots and shape-changing interfaces. In the field of HCI, there have been various inflatable prototyping tools that utilize air control, however, very few tools for liquid control have been developed. In this study, we propose HydroMod, new constructive modules that can easily generate liquid flow and programmatically control liquid flow, with the aim of lowering the barrier to entry for prototyping with liquids. HydroMod consists of palm-sized small modules, which can generate liquid flow with the electrohydrodynamics (EHD) phenomenon by simply connecting the modules. Moreover, users can configure and control the flow path by simply recombining the modules. In this paper, we propose the design of the modules, evaluate the performance of HydroMod as a fluid system, and also show the possible application scenarios of fluid prototyping using this system.2022TMTakafumi Morita et al.The University of TokyoShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsCHI