Aryan Saini

Bodily augmentations have been increasingly investigated by HCI researchers due to the associated benefits, such as accessibility, offering novel input space, and sensing environment. Most of these investigations have adopted a utilitarian perspective, providing impairment, mobility, and rehabilitation support. However, more recently a subset called bodily extensions has emerged that appears to also embrace experiential aspects. These bodily extensions physically extend the human body, going beyond traditional sensing and accessibility perspectives. Initial designs were mostly rigid, leading to a focus on short-term use, missing out on the opportunities for these bodily extensions to be integrated into everyday life. In our work, we build soft pneumatic-based bodily extensions that users can incorporate into their everyday lives. We detail the design and rationale behind these bodily extensions, along with the novel scenarios they enable. We share our insights from creating these systems and the associated user experiences from our field study with 48 participants, resulting in a design framework that will hopefully aid future designers in facilitating embodiment across everyday life through bodily extensions.

Prior research around the design of interactive systems has highlighted the benefits of supporting embodiment in everyday life. This resulted in the creation of body-centric systems that leverage movement. However, these advances supporting movement in everyday life, aligning with the embodiment theory, so far focused on sensing movement as opposed to facilitating movement. We present PneuMa, a novel wearable system that can facilitate movement in everyday life through pneumatic-based bodily extensions. We showcase the system through three examples: "Pardon?", moving the ear forward; "Greetings", moving a hand towards the "Bye-bye" gesture; "Take a break", moving the hands away from the keyboard, enabling the bodily extensions that support movement in everyday life. From the thematic analysis of a field study with 12 participants, we identified three themes: bodily awareness, Perception of the scenarios, and anticipating movement. We discuss our findings in relation to prior research around bodily extensions and embodied interaction to provide strategies to design bodily extensions that support movement in everyday life. Ultimately, we hope that our work helps more people profit from the benefits of everyday movement support.

Prior research has offered a plethora of wearables centred around sensing bodily actions ranging from more explicit data, such as movement and physiological response, to implicit information, such as ocular and brain activity. Bodily augmentations that physically extend the user’s body along with altering body schema and image have been proposed recently as well, owing to factors such as accessibility and improving communication. However, these attempts have usually consisted of uncomfortable interfaces that either restrict the user’s movement or are intrusive in nature. In this work, we present Pneunocchio, a playful nose augmentation based on the lore of Pinocchio. Pneunocchio consists of a pneumatic-based inflatable that a user wears on their nose to play a game of two truths and a lie. With our work, we aim to explore expressive bodily augmentations that respond to a player’s physiological state that can alter the perception of their body while serving as an expressive match for a current part of the body.

Interactions using the face, not only enable multi-tasking but also enable us to create hands-free applications. Previous works in HCI used sensors attached directly to the person’s face or inside their mouth. However, a mask, which has now become a norm in our everyday life and is socially acceptable, has rarely been used to explore facial interactions. We designed, “DUMask”, an interface that uses face parts covered by a mask to discretely enable 14 (+1 default) interactions. DUMask uses an infrared camera embedded inside an off-the-shelf face mask to recognize the gestures, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of our interface through in-lab studies. We conducted two user studies evaluating the experience of both the wearer and the onlooker, which validated that the interface is indeed inconspicuous and unobtrusive.