Yutaro Hirao (平尾悠太朗) is an Assistant Professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan (23-). He received his B.S. and M.S. in engineering from Waseda University (14-18, 18-20) in Japan, and his Ph.D. in information science and technology from the University of Tokyo (20-23). He is working on the research with the goal of achieving a freely morphing and ubiquitous body. His main research interests include virtual reality (VR), cross-modal interaction, embodiment, and haptic perception (pseudo-haptics).
Vision
My goal is to realize an embodiment that can be freely programmed and designed. Here, “embodiment” refers not merely to the innate, objective properties of the physical body, but to the bodily qualia that emerge from continuous interactions between body and environment—specifically, from the coherence between predicted sensations and actual sensory input within the brain’s motor–multisensory predictive model. Programmatic control of embodiment therefore means establishing technologies that can arbitrarily reconstruct this motor–multisensory predictive coupling in software. In a world where such technology exists, anyone could inhabit the precise “self” they desire. Furthermore, the ability to generate bodily sensations at will would constitute the very realization of Ivan Sutherland’s 1965 vision of the “Ultimate Display.”
SNS: X , Instagram, LinkedIn, facebook
E-mail: [email protected]
Please also refer to google scholar page.