Yan Wang

Monash University (Australia) · Faculty of Information Technology

The rapid urbanization has led to the loss of natural spaces and a subsequent disconnection between humans and nature, negatively affecting residents’ well-being and environmental awareness. There is a a growing interest in leveraging technology to address this gap in Human-Computer Interaction. This article introduces GoChirp, an AI-powered wearab...

There is an increasing interest in combining interactive technology with food, leading to a new research area called human-food interaction. While food experiences are increasingly benefiting from interactive technology, for example in the form of food tracking apps, 3D-printed food and projections on dining tables, a more systematic advancement of...

Ingestible sensors have become smaller and more powerful and allow us to envisage new human-computer interactions and bodily play experiences inside our bodies. Users can swallow ingestible sensors, which facilitate interior body sensing functions that provide data on which play experiences can be built. We call bodily play that uses ingestible sen...

There is an increasing interest in food within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field with emerging interactive prototypes that augment, extend, and challenge the various ways in which people engage with food. The emerging subfield is defined as “Human-Food Interaction” (HFI). Given the rapid advancement of interactive technology that converges...

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is increasingly interested in supporting exertion experiences so more people can benefit from physical activity. So far, most systems have focused on sensing and presenting information to the user via screens to support the exertion experience. Interestingly, emerging technology can also act on the exerting user's b...

Sonic Straws is a beverage-based gustosonic system that allows users to experience playful personalized sounds via drinking through straws. The system consists of two straws, a customized lid, and a holder containing a microcontroller. It performs a sensing process via the two straws connected to the microcontroller to sense capacitance, which then...

Prior psychology studies have shown that eating ice cream increases happiness, while human-computer interaction work has shown that interactive technology can enrich the eating experience. We explore the opportunity to combine these two through WeScream!, a playful social gustosonic system we designed-social gustosonic referring to the link between...

Recent advances in interactive technology are being used to enrich our interactions around food and drinks. Making use of sound to enrich dining - providing “gustosonic” experiences - has recently garnered interest as an exciting area of ubiquitous computing. However, these experiences have tended to focus on eating. In response to the lack of drin...

The notion of gustosonic refers to the link between eating actions and listening within a combined multisensory experience. When it comes to designing celebratory technology for eating, i.e. technology that celebrates the experiential and playful aspects of eating, the use of sound has been mostly underexplored. In this paper, we present our work b...

There is an increasing trend in HCI to combine eating and technology. We highlight the potential of interactive technology to support an experiential perspective on eating, in particular, how interactive technology can support experiencing eating as play. To understanding this, we reflect on four playful interactive eating systems we designed and t...

There is an increasing trend in utilizing interactive technology for bodily integrations, such as additional limbs and ingestibles. Prior work on bodily integrated systems mostly examined them from a productivity perspective. In this article, we suggest examining this trend also from an experiential, playful perspective, as we believe that these sy...

An imaging capsule is a pill-shaped device used to record images of the user's gastrointestinal tract. Existing research mainly focuses on the imaging capsule's functional perspective, while its experiential perspective is usually overlooked. To explore this, we introduce a playful system called InsideOut where the player wears an iPad to display t...

There is an increasing trend that explores the convergence of digital play and eating to support a playful relationship with food. We note that interactive sound, although prevalent in digital game design, has only received limited attention in this trend. To contribute to an understanding of "playful gus-tosonic experiences", we present a design a...

A study with 32 participants, the cone played four different sounds (a roaring, crunchy, giggling, and burping sound in order to explore fantasy facilitation, food congruency, anthropomorphism and bodily response) when eating ice cream.

Conduct an in-the-wild study with householders to understand playful social gustosonic experiences.

" Ingestible sensors are pill-like sensors that people swallow mainly for medical purposes. We propose that ingestible sensors also offer unique opportunities to facilitate intriguing bodily experiences in a playful manner. To explore this, we present "HeatCraft", a two-player system that translates the user's body temperature measured by an ingest...

Despite the known benefits of commensal eating, eating alone is becoming increasingly common as people struggle to find time and manage geographical boundaries to enjoy a meal together. Eating alone however can be boring, less motivating and shown to have negative impact on health and wellbeing of a person. To remedy such situations, we undertake a...

In this demonstration, we present iScream!, a novel gustosonic experience that generates unique digital sounds as a result of eating ice cream. The system uses capacitive sensing to detect eating actions and based on these actions, it plays out six different playful sounds to facilitate a playful eating experience. Our aim is to support a playful w...

We note a trend on utilizing interactive technology to extend human capacities through bodily cyborg-like integrations such as artificial limbs and implantables. This trend is often captured by the term "transhumanism", referring to the use of technology to extend human capacities. We find that many transhuman discussions appear to focus on instrum...

There is an increasing trend in interaction design to engage with food. We note that most prior work targets instrumental benefits (for example see food tracking apps to manage nutritional intake). In contrast, in this article, we highlight the potential of technology to support eating as a form of play. We reflect on our own work to articulate two...

Food sounds - sounds that certain foods make during eating through chewing, biting or licking - are key parts of the eating experience. They play an important role in establishing our perception about the palatability of food. We believe interactive technology offers unique opportunities to create novel playful experiences with food by playing with...