Engineering the
Meaning of Life

I am an assistant professor at the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, The University of Tokyo, where I research technologies such as virtual reality (VR), avatars, and the metaverse. If I had to name the field, it would be human–computer interaction (HCI) — the study of designing how people relate to computers. But what I've consistently looked at within that field is not the technology itself, but what happens to a person's "self" the moment they touch it. Change someone's appearance, and their behavior changes; eventually, even their sense of who they are begins to shift. I've faced this puzzle by moving back and forth between engineering, psychology, and qualitative research.

This history has passed through two major turns: from the laboratory to the field, and from numbers to words. What follows is the story of those turns. Individual papers and practices can be traced through the links below.

The starting point was a simple realization from my undergraduate years. Enrolled in engineering but drawn to the humanities, I filled my schedule with lectures on the human mind. Struck, as if by lightning, by the — perhaps obvious — discovery that "it's fine to think about matters of the mind even in an engineering department," I knocked on the door of a VR lab. There, the science of understanding the human mind and the engineering of designing it had fused into one.

The Laboratory Years — When the Body Changes, the Mind Changes

In graduate school, I spent my time in the laboratory investigating how body transformation experiences mediated through avatars affect a person's perception, cognition, and behavior. I built Double Shellf, where I faced a doppelganger identical to myself; ran self-distancing experiments that manipulated psychological distance by viewing my own body from outside as if in an out-of-body experience; and studied how a neighboring avatar's appearance and role shape the Proteus effect and the social Simon effect — tracing, through one experiment after another, how a change in appearance seeps into the mind. In my research on co-embodiment — operating a single avatar by blending the movements of two people — I tackled the transfer of physical skill and the mystery of "whose agency was that," and received two international awards for it. These findings, spanning transformation, doppelgangers, and co-embodiment, are summarized in a chapter of a cognitive science textbook.

The Dead End and the Turn — From Numbers to Words

But toward the end of my Ph.D., I ran into a dead end. My laboratory data produced clear statistical significance, yet what that avatar experience meant for a person's life never showed up in the numbers. I wanted to do computing for the mind, but I kept feeling that my research wasn't really touching it. This crisis is what led me out to qualitative research methods — beyond experiments bound to numbers, toward interviews and fieldwork that trace words instead. Today, planting this methodology firmly within the VR field has become another lifework of mine.

Into the Field — Witnessing the Transformation of the Narrative Self

After that turn, I went out into the field. Since 2020, I have kept visiting the Avatar Robot Cafe, where people with mobility disabilities work by remotely operating robots, and have described how the experience of "working through an avatar" reconstructs a person's identity. In the Life Experience Exchange Metaverse, a life's turning point is co-created as a metaverse space, then retold while walking through it with someone important to that person. At Bethel's House in Urakawa, Hokkaido, I joined a tojisha-kenkyu practice that expresses and shares auditory and visual hallucination experiences through VR/AR, and was given the phrase "from co-creation to co-delusion." I have also approached the friendships and self-expression of people living in the metaverse through the words of those who live there.

Now — Building Technologies of Retelling

What I have witnessed again and again in these fields is the moment a person retells their interpretation of their own past, present, and future — their narrative self. The facts of the past cannot be changed, but the meaning of the past can always be retold. My core project now is JST PRESTO's "technology for supporting the retelling of past, present, and future," through which I am working on a design theory of embodied interaction that supports this retelling. In parallel, two more projects have started moving: "the control of serendipity," which extends this inquiry from bodily experience to intellectual experience, and "Enhancing Humanity," an international network opening body augmentation technology to real-world sites around the world.

Not to "operate" the human mind with technology, but to reclaim, together with technology, the power to reinterpret the meaning of one's own life. In an age when the whirlpool of information generated by computation keeps interrogating human meaning, I hope technologies like these can restore the power to accept reality and still go on weaving the story of the self.