Research Portfolio
50+ projects across bodies, play & technology
Peer-reviewed research exploring how technology can extend, augment, and play with the human body — from brain-to-brain interfaces to games controlled by electrical muscle stimulation.
Inflated Exertion: Designing a Bodily Extension that Embodies Physical Activity
Interactive technologies such as smartwatches have been increasingly used to track physical activity.
Playing with Yourself: How Electrical Muscle Stimulation Can Turn Your Body Into A Playful Interface
Imagine a game where your body is both the controller and the game.
PlantMate: A Bidirectional Touch-Based System for Enhancing Human-Plant Empathy and Pro-Environmental Behavior
Enhancing the emotional connection between humans and nature is critical for fostering pro-environmental behavior, yet humans often struggle to perceive plants’ responses to environmental changes.
GastroConcerto: Towards Designing Auditory Dining System to Enrich Chefs’ Culinary Practices
Sound plays a crucial role in shaping diners’ perceptions and enhancing the dining experience.
LuciEntry: Towards Understanding the Design of Lucid Dream Induction
Lucid dreaming, a state in which people become aware that they are dreaming, is known for its many mental and physical health benefits.
Respireal: Enriching Human-Nature Connection through a Breath-Controlled Mixed Reality Experience
Biofeedback in mixed reality offers a powerful means of enhancing users’ bodily awareness and reconnecting people with nature.
From Notes to Keys: A VR Learning Environment for Sheet Music Interpretation
Learning to interpret sheet music and play musical instruments (piano) remains a significant challenge for beginners, often requiring extensive practice and guidance.
LuciTouch: Influencing Lucid Dreams Through Incorporation of Somatosensory Stimuli.
Lucid dreaming can offer many benefits, such as reducing nightmares and enhancing creativity; however, insufficient dream control may limit these benefits.
Leveling Up Leadership: Emerging Voices and Evolving Practices in the Games & Play Community
This workshop brings together emerging and established leaders in the Games & Play research community to reflect on their leadership journeys, exchange best practices, and collectively envision the future of leadership in the field.
Blindfolded in the Air: Towards the Design of Interactive Aerial Play
The intersection of aerial acrobatics (movement on a suspended apparatus where the performer is off the ground) and interactive technology remains an underexplored area in HCI.
Homoludic Augmentation: Preliminary Reflections
Traditional play theories emphasise voluntary participation, bodily autonomy, and player agency.
PneuMa: Designing Pneumatic Bodily Extensions for Supporting Movement in Everyday Life
Prior research around the design of interactive systems has highlighted the benefits of supporting embodiment in everyday life.
Exploring Shared Bodily Control: Designing Augmented Human Systems for Intra- and Inter-Corporeality
The human-computer interaction community has evolved from using body-sensing to body-actuating technologies, transforming the body’s role from a mere input to an input-output medium.
GazeAway: Designing for Gaze Aversion Experiences
Gaze aversion is embedded in our behaviour: we look at a blank area to support remembering and creative thinking, and as a social cue that we are thinking.
PneuMa: Designing Pneumatic Bodily Extensions for Supporting Movement in Everyday Life
Prior research around the design of interactive systems has highlighted the benefits of supporting embodiment in everyday life.
Grand Challenges in SportsHCI
The field of Sports Human-Computer Interaction (SportsHCI) investigates interaction design to support a physically active human being.
PsiNet: Toward Understanding the Design of Brain-to-Brain Interfaces for Augmenting Inter-Brain Synchrony
Underlying humanity’s social abilities is the brain’s capacity to interpersonally synchronize.
Shared Bodily Fusion: Leveraging Inter-Body Electrical Muscle Stimulation for Social Play
Traditional games like "Tag" rely on shared control via inter-body interactions (IBIs) – touching, pushing, and pulling – that foster emotional and social connection.
WaterHCI: Water in Human-Computer Interaction
Over recent years, there has been an increase in the coming together of interactive technology and water, leading to the emergence of WaterHCI, a distinct subfield of human-computer interaction (HCI).
Exploring the Design Space of Assistive Augmentation
Assistive Augmentation, the intersection of human-computer interaction, assistive technologies and human augmentation, was broadly discussed at the CHI’14 workshop and subsequently published as an edited volume on Springer Cognitive Science and Technology series.
AI in the Shell: Towards an Understanding of Integrated Embodiment
An exoskeleton system where an AI lives "inside" the user's body and can take over control of their movements to assist with tasks, like improving their game performance. The project raises the question of what it really means for a computer to become part of your embodied experience.
Towards Designing for Everyday Embodied Remembering: Findings from a Diary Study
A diary study exploring the many ways people use their bodies to remember things – like your fingers "knowing" a piano piece even when your mind doesn't. The resulting framework helps designers think about building technology that supports this physical, muscle-based kind of memory.
Fluito: Towards Understanding the Design of Playful Water Experiences through an Extended Reality Floatation Tank System
Water's pleasant nature and associated health benefits have captivated the interest of HCI researchers.
Auto-Paizo Games: Towards Understanding the Design of Games That Aim to Unify a Player’s Physical Body and the Virtual World
Most digital bodily games focus on the body as they use movement as input.
Fused Spectatorship: Designing Bodily Experiences Where Spectators Become Players
An experience where audience members loan control of both their hands to a computer via electrical muscle stimulation and watch their own hands play games – blurring the line between watching a game and playing one. Participants often couldn't tell whether they were a player or a spectator.
Pneunocchio: A playful nose augmentation for facilitating embodied representation
A playful inflatable nose worn during a "two truths and a lie" game that physically grows in response to your physiological state. Relevant for entertainment product designers, social game creators, and wearable biosensing companies.
Going into Depth: Learning from a Survey of Interactive Designs for Aquatic Recreation
A systematic review of 48 research papers on interactive technology designed for water-based activities, from swimming to water parks. The paper maps out what's been done and identifies design opportunities for making aquatic recreation more engaging and beneficial.
Human–Computer Integration: Towards Integrating the Human Body with the Computational Machine
An academic monograph laying out a new framework for thinking about technology that integrates with the human body, not just technology that the body uses. It identifies key questions researchers need to answer to responsibly advance this vision.
SomaFlatables: Supporting Embodied Cognition through Pneumatic Bladders
Wearable inflatable devices that physically push or extend parts of your body, for example, nudging your posture or expanding your perceived shape, to create new kinds of bodily experiences. The project explores how inflatables, rather than screens, could be a medium for interactive experiences.
Gooey Gut Trail: Board Game Play to Understand Human-Microbial Interactions
Our gastrointestinal health is influenced by complex interactions between our gut bacteria and multiple external factors.
Towards Understanding the Design of Body-Actuated Play
Bodily games often use players’ physiology as input to provide output via screen-based modalities.
TouchMate: Understanding the Design of Body Actuating Games using Physical Touch
A game where one player tries to guess which of two suspects secretly touched their leg under a table, with a twist: the act of touching completes an electrical circuit that involuntarily moves both players' hands at the same time. It explores how technology-mediated physical touch can create surprising and social gameplay.
Towards an Initial Understanding of the Design of Playful Water Experiences Through Flotation
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers are increasingly captivated by water interactions and hence explored interactive devices to support aquatic activities in different settings (e.g., mixed realities in water parks).
Limited Control Over the Body as Intriguing Play Design Resource
Interest in combining interactive play and the human body, using “bodily play” systems, is increasing.
vrCAPTCHA: Exploring CAPTCHA Designs in Virtual Reality
With the popularity of online access in virtual reality (VR) devices, it will become important to investigate exclusive and interactive CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) designs for VR devices.
SIGHInt: Special Interest Group for Human-Computer Integration
Human-Computer Integration (HInt) is a growing paradigm within HCI which seeks to understand how humans can, and already are, merging with computational machines.
Do Cyborgs dream of Electric Limbs? Experiential Factors in Human-Computer Integration Design and Evaluation
A workshop examining not just whether body-integrated technologies work functionally, but whether people actually feel them as part of their own body. The session used hands-on experiments with body illusions to explore what makes technology feel truly integrated.
Out of Your Mind!? Embodied Interaction in Sports
A workshop exploring how interactive sports technology could be designed around what athletes feel and experience rather than just their performance statistics. The researchers focused on themes like sensory augmentation, flow states, and freeing the mind during physical activity.
Myopic Bike and Say Hi: Games for Empathizing with The Myopic
Two virtual reality games that simulate the blurry, disorienting experience of being short-sighted without glasses, like riding a bike or recognising a friend on the street. The goal is to help people without myopia genuinely understand and empathise with what short-sighted people go through every day.
Actuating Myself: Designing Hand-Games Incorporating Electrical Muscle Stimulation
Digital versions of classic hand games like Rock-Paper-Scissors, where electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) – small electrical pulses sent to your muscles – causes your hand to move involuntarily as part of the gameplay. The research investigates what it's like to play games where the computer can literally move your body for you.
Reducing Perceived Waiting Time in Theme Park Queues via an Augmented Reality Game
Theme parks visits can be very playful events for families, however, waiting in the ride’s queues can often be the cause of great frustration.
Future InBodied: A Framework for Inbodied Interaction Design
Inbodied interaction is an emerging area in HCI that aligns how the body performs internally with our designs to support and optimise human performance.
Towards Designing Bodily Integrated Play
There is an increasing trend in utilizing interactive technology for bodily integrations, such as additional limbs and ingestibles.
“Erfahrung & Erlebnis”: Understanding the Bodily Play Experience through German Lexicon
This paper borrows two German words to help designers describe two distinct types of experience in physical games: conscious, knowledge-gaining experience versus deeper, felt "lived" experience. The distinction gives game designers a richer vocabulary for talking about what players actually go through.
Drone Chi: Somaesthetic Human-Drone Interaction
An experience inspired by Tai Chi where participants move slowly and mindfully in close proximity to a drone that responds to their gestures. The project investigates how drones can be designed for intimate, body-aware interaction rather than just practical tasks.
Motor Memory in HCI
There is mounting evidence acknowledging that embodiment is foundational to cognition.
Experiencing the Body as Play
A research paper arguing that the future of games isn't just about using your body as a controller, but about experiencing your body itself as the game. The paper offer design guidance for this emerging vision.
Arm-A-Dine: Towards Understanding the Design of Playful Embodied Eating Experiences
A social dining experiment where people eat using robotic arms attached to their bodies, and each person's robotic arm is controlled by their dining partner's emotional reactions. The project explores how playful technology can make shared meals more interesting and mindful.
The Guts Game: Towards Designing Ingestible Games
A two-player game where each player swallows a sensor pill that measures their internal body temperature, and they compete by doing tasks that change that temperature. It's an early exploration of what games might look like when the "controller" is literally inside your body.
Life Tree: Understanding the Design of Breathing Exercise Games
A virtual reality game where players grow a virtual tree by practicing controlled breathing techniques. The researchers used it to figure out what makes breathing exercise games enjoyable and effective.