INFO3315Human-Computer Interaction

    11-01 · Week 11

    Guest lecture: mediated social touch

    Russian (Ruo-Xuan) Wu on hugging at a distance: the Hugging Suit, the mediated social touch pipeline, and a speculative workshop on its opportunities and threats.

    Not examinable. This material is outside Lectures 1 to 10.

    • Describe what mediated social touch is and the record, edit, reproduce pipeline.
    • Recall the Make, Speculate, Respond structure of the talk.
    • List the threats and challenges the speculative workshops raised.

    6 min readJump to the quiz ↓

    Optional aside

    Not examinable. Guest_Lecture_1.pdf is too large to host on this site, so the slides are on Canvas. This page summarises the text that extracted from them.

    Intuition

    Can you hug someone through a screen? The talk builds a hugging suit, then asks what happens to society if everyone could send touch.

    Make: a remote hugging system

    Russian (Ruo-Xuan) Wu, a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney Design Lab, presented on 21 October 2026. The Hugging Suit (Wu et al., 2025) is a pneumatic system for remote haptic experiences with a hug receiver suit and a hug initiator suit, using an air actuator matrix, air tank and wearable air compressor, plus pressure sensing. Possible applications named: remote massage, guiding visually impaired people, memorialising deceased loved ones, and “Hmoji”.

    Earlier devices used vibration motors (Hug Shirt 2002, Synesthesia Suit 2016, TactSuitX40 2021), electro-stimulation (Tesla Suit 2020) or pneumatic airbags (Hug Over a Distance 2005, Huggy Pajama 2008, Force Jacket 2018). Mediated Social Touch (MST) connects a touch initiator and touch receiver through haptic devices: recording (input), editing and reproducing (output). A further idea synthesised touch from prompts such as “a cute touch” with a haptic AI model.

    Speculate: what could go wrong if everyone uses it

    Research questions: what opportunities and threats might MST bring, and what distinctive challenges arise if everyone uses it. Method: Future Ripples workshops (Epp et al., 2022), with the core activity “What if…?”, with potential users (N=6), domain experts (N=6) and haptics researchers (N=12). Findings: remote touch complicates consent and exposes users to physical harassment; asynchronous touch reshapes social touch practices. Challenges: encoding touch-based expertise without eroding apprenticeship, establishing consent negotiation protocols, and moderating the persistence of touch.

    Respond

    The slides for this part were removed because the paper is under review. The talk ends with a list of design tools from a book: affinity diagram, co-design workshop, cultural probes, focus groups, future workshops, interviews, role-playing, science fiction prototyping, thematic analysis.

    Recall

    Name the three distinctive challenges of MST.

    Encoding expertise without eroding apprenticeship; consent negotiation protocols; moderating the persistence of touch.

    Check yourself

    Select all that apply

    Source

    Guest Lecture 1 PDF