Cuddly: Enchant Your Soft Objects with a Mobile Phone

We are surrounded by soft objects such as plush toys, cushions etc. in our daily lives. People often hug soft objects when they are feeling emotional. From the psychological point of view, soft objects can highly influence people’s lives and behavior. Thus, soft objects are often used in different fields such as medical therapy, communication, gaming etc. We aim to provide users with a system that can be can easily obtain and experience at low cost to spread the benefits of soft interfaces. We believe that this is important to discover new human needs and playing methods. Therefore, this research aims to utilize a device, which a majority of us are equipped with, to create an interaction with soft objects which we already have in our home. We introduce Cuddly, a phone application to enchant soft objects to enhance interaction with the objects. Cuddly utilizes the phone’s camera and light to detect surrounding brightness. By integrating Cuddly and then compressing the object, the brightness level decreases. Utilizing the change in values, we can implement diverse entertainment applications.

Suzanne Low
Keio University

Yuta Sugiura
Keio University

Kevin Fan
Keio University

Masahiko Inami
Keio University