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. Mainly, this is research in human–computer interaction (HCI) — the field that designs how people relate to computers. But what I've consistently been drawn to within it is not the technology itself, but what happens to a person's "self" once they've touched 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 information science and engineering and the humanities and social sciences, freely combining both quantitative and qualitative research methods.

This history has passed through a turn: from the laboratory to the field, from numbers to words. At the root of it was one question — am I coming to know what I want to know, in the way I wanted to know it? What follows is the story of how that question kept pulling me off course. Individual papers and practices can be traced through the links below.

The starting point was a vague unease from my undergraduate years. The line between the sciences and the humanities had been installed in me, almost like a curse, ever since high school; yet there I was, enrolled in engineering and drawn to Japanese literature, filling my schedule with lectures on the human mind. Psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, information engineering… I considered department after department, and none of them quite fit. It was in the midst of this that I encountered Professor Takuji Narumi — who would later become my mentor — and the field of virtual reality. 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 melted into one.

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

In graduate school, I kept investigating in the laboratory how body transformation experiences mediated through avatars affect a person's perception, cognition, and behavior: Double Shellf, where I faced a doppelganger identical to myself; self-distancing research that manipulated psychological distance by viewing my own body from outside as if in an out-of-body experience; and how a neighboring avatar's appearance and role shape the Proteus effect and the social Simon effect… I kept chasing, through one experiment after another, how a change in an avatar's appearance shifts a person's cognition and behavior. 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." 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 the effect sizes were often smaller than I'd hoped, and I kept being let down: "there's a difference, sure, but is that all?" I had set out declaring "I'll become the self I want to be, through avatars," and now something felt off. What that avatar experience meant for a person's life simply never showed up in the numbers. Looking back, an unspoken assumption — "research means running experiments" — had been working on me more strongly than I knew. In international communities like CHI and DIS, humanities and social science researchers are simply part of the field of information studies as a matter of course, and research methodologies vary widely. It was only much later that I noticed the "bias" in this — in VR studies and Japan's HCI field, where the presence of engineering, of building things, looms large, and where evaluating experience has centered on laboratory experiments. Reading my way, half-understanding, through book after book during my Ph.D., I finally saw through this assumption — because I encountered qualitative research methods. Beyond experiments that lean on numbers, toward words and lived narratives, through interviews and fieldwork. 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. As I kept visiting the Avatar Robot Cafe from 2020 on — where people with mobility limitations work by remotely operating robots — I met a phrase the pilots kept reaching for: "time started moving again." Time that had stood still through years of being bedridden begins, through working as an avatar, to move once more. From that first-person telling, I described how the experience of "working through an avatar" reweaves a person's identity. There's also the Life Experience Exchange Metaverse, in which a life's turning point is co-created as a metaverse space, then retold while walking through that place together with someone important. And at Bethel House (Urakawa, Hokkaido), I joined a tojisha-kenkyu practice that gives form to auditory and visual hallucination experiences through VR/AR and shares them. Here, technologies like VR and avatars serve as a "table" for dialogue — a place to look at that experience together with friends and family, sometimes laughing about it with a little humor. In recent years, I've also been working, through interviews with those involved, on research that brings to light the friendships and self-expression of people living in the metaverse.

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. And what holds a person up is less what they can actually do than the richness of the web of anticipations — the sense that "maybe I could do that, and this too." When that web thins out, time stands still; when it swells again, time starts moving. I think the felt sense that "this world is worth living in" probably lives somewhere around here. My core project now is JST PRESTO's "Creating Embodied Interactions that Foster Reinterpretation of the Past, Present, and Future," through which I am working on a design theory of embodied interaction that supports this retelling. In parallel, "the control of serendipity," which designs information environments based on an understanding of bodily characteristics such as attention and cognition, and "Enhancing Humanity," an international network opening body augmentation technology to real-world sites around the world, have also started moving.

In an age when the whirlpool of information generated by computation keeps interrogating human meaning, what's needed is the strength to accept reality and still go on weaving the story of the self. In an age where AI is thinning out the differences in what we can do, it is rather why we want to — and what kind of love we hold for it — that decides the texture of a life. More than support for doing more, I want to support a "life" in which one can take in even the self that couldn't, and still cheer that self on. 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. Research, I've come to think, is at heart an attitude: the attitude of taking joy in knowing itself (philosophy). How do you cultivate that attitude — one you cannot summon by force, and which is, in a sense, a kind of "body" — is the question. Fellow adventurers, wanted.