Welcome to our Sensorimotor Devices Workshop 🦾 — a pioneering space where technology meets human experience!
Mission
An emerging space in interface research is wearable devices that closely couple their sensing and actuation abilities. A well-known example is MetaLimbs, where sensed movements of the foot are directly mapped to the actuation of supernumerary robotic limbs. These systems are different from wearables focused on sensing, such as fitness trackers, or wearables focused on actuation, such as VR headsets. They are characterized by tight coupling between the user’s action and the resulting digital feedback from the device, in time, space, and mode. The properties of this coupling are critical for the user’s experience, including the user’s sense of agency, body ownership, and experience of the surrounding world.
Understanding such systems is an open challenge, which requires knowledge not only of computer science and HCI, but also Psychology, Physiology, Design, Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Control Theory. This workshop aims to foster discussion between these diverse disciplines and to identify links and synergies in their work, ultimately developing a common understanding of future research directions for systems that intrinsically couple sensing and action.
Key Objectives
This one-day workshop offers an interdisciplinary forum for academics and practitioners to discuss opportunities, challenges, and long-term visions in this space.
- Create a coherent outline of relevant artifacts, systems, and interfaces that successfully instantiate a close coupling between sensing and actuation to augment bodily experience (e.g., wearable and tangible interfaces, haptics, e-textiles), documenting these examples in an online collection similar to Haptipedia.
- Identify common elements of experience, agency and control, and comprehensive understanding of the opportunities opened up by coupling sensing and action to augment the bodily experience.
- Generate a set of open research questions to be addressed in future work, creating research opportunities within a 5- and 50-year horizon
- Share theoretical methodological grounding between multi- and inter-disciplinary work, drawing on the diverse backgrounds of the community to outline a shared “success” criteria.
- Solidify a community, involving the creation of a special interest group, around sensorimotor devices to support researchers at various points in their careers in pursuing and contextualizing this work.
Join Us!
We invite potential participants to share 1-3 relevant technologies or experiences (to be discussed in pre-workshop brainstorming). Each should be presented in a self-contained manner, together with a description of its relevance. Examples by other researchers should be appropriately cited and contextualized with thoughtful commentary. Please also indicate the possibility of bringing chosen examples as physical demos to the workshop, and a short biography of the participant(s).
- Submissions should be 2-5 pages long (incl. references) using the CHI Extended Abstracts format and submitted as non-anonymized PDF.
- Quality submissions will be selected by the workshop team to ensure a diversity of disciplines, backgrounds, and career stages.
The submission button can be found at the top of this page.
Important dates
Submission deadline: February 13, 2025 AoE
Notification: March 10, 2025 AoE