“Cuddly: Enchant Your Soft Objects with A Mobile Phone” by Low, Sugiura, Fan and Inami
Conference:
Experience Type(s):
Title:
- Cuddly: Enchant Your Soft Objects with A Mobile Phone
Organizer(s)/Presenter(s):
Description:
We are surrounded by soft objects such as plush toys, cushions etc. in our daily lives: people often hug soft objects when they are feeling emotional such as while watching movies, or they tend to punch or throw objects when they are feeling frustrated. From the psychological point of view, soft objects can highly influence people’s lives and behavior [Ackermann et al. 1999]. Research shows that it can help reduce stress as well as increase effectiveness. Because of that, soft objects are often used in different fields such as medical therapy, communication, gaming purposes etc. Our research group has also created FuwaFuwa [Sugiura et al. 2011], a sensing module which uses soft object as an interface in the past.
We are surrounded by soft objects such as plush toys, cushions etc. in our daily lives. People often hug soft objects when they are feeling emotional. From the psychological point of view, soft objects can highly influence people’s lives and behavior. Thus, soft objects are often used in different fields such as medical therapy, communication, gaming etc. We aim to provide users with a system that can be can easily obtain and experience at low cost to spread the benefits of soft interfaces. We believe that this is important to discover new human needs and playing methods. Therefore, this research aims to utilize a device, which a majority of us are equipped with, to create an interaction with soft objects which we already have in our home. We introduce Cuddly, a phone application to enchant soft objects to enhance interaction with the objects. Cuddly utilizes the phone’s camera and light to detect surrounding brightness. By integrating Cuddly and then compressing the object, the brightness level decreases. Utilizing the change in values, we can implement diverse entertainment applications.
References:
[1] Ackerman, J. M., Nocera, C. C., and Bargh, J. A. 2010. Incidental haptic sensations influence social judgements and decisions. In Science 328 (5986): 1712–1715.
[2] Sugiura, Y., Kakehi, G., Withana, A., Lee, C., Sakamoto, D., Sugimoto, M., Inami, M. and Igarashi, T. 2011. Deformation of Soft Objects Using Directional Photoreflectivity Measurement. In Proceeding UIST’11, ACM, 509–516.
