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. At the root of both was one and the same 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 simple realization 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. 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 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 the effect sizes were often smaller than I had hoped, and I kept being quietly 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. Everywhere I looked, the ready-made fruit of experimental practice hung within reach, and if you didn't think twice, you just reached out and ate it. The moment I noticed that assumption, I was led out to 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. In the Life Experience Exchange Metaverse, a life's turning point is co-created as a metaverse space, then retold while walking through it together, pointing at things side by side. 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. Not persuading yourself on your own, but looking at your difficulty together with friends and family — and sometimes laughing at it with a little humor: to that shape of co-creation, an editor gave 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. And what holds a person up, the field taught me, 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. 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, 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 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 the power to take in even the self that could not, and still cheer that self on. Research, in the end, is an attitude: the attitude of taking joy in knowing itself — a joy you cannot summon by force. It is an attitude the field has slowly grown in me. When the whirlpool of information generated by computation keeps interrogating human meaning, I place my hope in technologies like these — and in the love of knowing — to restore the power to accept reality and still go on weaving the story of the self.