JST PRESTO · 2025–2029

Creating Embodied Interactions that Foster Reinterpretation of the Past, Present, and Future

The facts of the past cannot be changed. But the meaning of the past keeps changing. This research supports that retelling through avatars and the metaverse.

"Because I failed back then, I am who I am now" — the same event can look entirely different in meaning depending on the point in life from which you look back on it. In psychology, the interpretations of one's past, present, and future, woven together into a single story, are called the "narrative self." There is also evidence that people who have managed to reframe a negative past in a positive light — a "redemptive experience" — tend to report greater well-being.

Meanwhile, research on VR and avatars has so far concentrated on measuring changes that occur within the short span of a laboratory session — effects such as behaving differently when your appearance changes. Technologies that address what such an experience means for a person's life story barely exist yet.

What I am attempting in this project is to design the "retelling" that talk-based therapy has carried out, as a bodily experience — in other words, an engineering practice of narrative therapy. Concretely, we are developing three approaches.

  1. Reinterpreting the past — overwriting memories. Recreating the scene of a painful memory as a metaverse space, and re-enacting "that moment" together with friends or family.
  2. Reinterpreting the present — editing relationships. Parent and child, boss and subordinate. Using avatars to swap or level out fixed roles, and looking at a current relationship anew.
  3. Reinterpreting the future — expanding predictions. Trying on occupations and ways of living you have never seen, one after another in VR, and stepping outside the prediction that "this is who I am."

One of the starting points was a scene I witnessed in the field of the Life Experience Exchange Metaverse: a mother and daughter who had been separated were reunited in a metaverse space and retold their memories of the past together. A technology that lets you step bodily into a story might reach something that words alone cannot — that is what I came to think.

Of course, this is not a claim that technology automatically turns a life around. That is why, before building systems, this project accumulates fieldwork and interviews in the metaverse and at the Avatar Robot Cafe (DAWN ver.β), designing in a way that stays close to the questions each generation carries — for the young, "who can I become?"; in midlife, "is this the way things should stay?"; and in later life, "what has my life been?"