Kirill Ragozin
Embodied interaction
Most computing still reaches people through a screen and leaves the rest of the body idle. These projects look at what else can carry information between a person and a machine. Each was built end to end, from custom hardware and sensing to the software on top, and studied with the people who used it.
Temperature as a medium
Temperature shapes how a place feels, yet mixed reality leaves the skin out.
This dissertation treats heat and cold as a design material: modular wearable thermal displays for the face, arms and neck, a control utility with Unity and Unreal Engine integrations, a perception study and a taxonomy for designing with temperature.
Ph.D. dissertation, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design, 2021
Gaze and privacy
A screen can be read by anyone who can see it. This one is legible only where its reader is looking.
An eye tracker follows the gaze and the page renders only the words under it, masking the rest. A user study compared normal, underscored and scrambled text for both the reader and a shoulder surfer.
MobileHCI 2019, Taipei · Demo at UbiComp / ISWC 2019, London
Eyes-free navigation
Directions delivered to the neck leave the eyes and hands free.
A neck-worn band of vibration motors encodes eight directions. Users recognised them with up to 95% accuracy and followed a navigated walk outdoors by touch.
Augmented Human 2019, Reims
Physiological loop
A horror story told through the body of the player.
A wearable suit delivers prolonged cold to the arms and neck, some scenes are played with eyes closed, and the world responds to heart rate and breathing, so the player and the game affect each other.
SIGGRAPH 2020 Immersive Pavilion · CHI 2020 Student Game Competition finalist
Biosignal input
The eyes can enter a secret without the hands or the screen taking part.
Eye movements are read through the electrooculography electrodes of JINS MEME smart glasses and used to unlock a phone, leaving nothing for an observer to watch. Evaluated against PIN entry with 15 participants.
Augmented Humans 2022, Kashiwa
Thermal display
Warmth and cold on the face change how present a virtual place feels.
A standalone headset with six Peltier elements on its rim heats and cools the face in step with the scene. In a counterbalanced study with 15 participants, thermal feedback made a significant difference to reported presence.
MUM 2021, Leuven
Remote presence
The heartbeat and breathing of an artist animate an object in a gallery far away.
A sensing wristband streams physiological data over the internet to an abstract artifact that turns it into light, sound and vibration. Visitors can add their own signals and play along.
Augmented Humans 2023, Glasgow
Usable security
Two-factor authentication is widely recommended and widely disliked.
In-depth interviews with 42 people about their experiences with two-factor authentication and about what a second factor could be: its form, where it lives and how it is handled. The results describe requirements that current solutions do not meet.
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 29 (5), 2022
Sensory substitution
A sport that exists only while your eyes are closed.
Players sense virtual projectiles as heat and vibration on their hands and send them back to the other team. Wearables track position, hand direction and eye closure and talk wirelessly to the game server.
Superhuman Sports Design Challenge 2018, Delft
Sensing in daily life
Ordinary-looking glasses can register blinks, reading and conversation outside the lab.
A software platform for JINS MEME smart glasses that logs electrooculography and motion data, recognises activities such as talking, reading and blinking in real time, and supports studies in everyday settings.
MobileHCI 2019, Taipei
Studies in the wild
Studies of how people move in VR rarely leave the lab. This one was shipped as a game.
Players find the key and the exit of a procedurally generated maze using arm swing, walk-in-place or trackpad movement while the game logs performance, preference and sickness. It ran in over 124 sessions across 10 countries in three weeks.
CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts
Peripheral awareness
An automated car can tell its passenger what it sees through warmth and cold on the face.
Obstacles and other cars are encoded as hot and cold cues on a thermal headset during a simulated automated drive. In a study with 16 participants, cold cues stood out as the most noticeable and preferred.
IUI 2022 Companion, Helsinki
Predictive haptics
Heat is slow, so the interface has to act before the user does.
A machine learning model predicts where the hand is heading and starts warming or cooling early, so the sensation arrives at the moment of touch. Built as a battery-powered wearable with a compact water cooling system.
VRST 2018, Tokyo
Sensory supplementation
Temperature used as an extra sense for what cannot be seen.
Players find and deflect incoming attacks by the heat and cold they feel on the hand and forearm. The glove and sleeve are driven from a small backpack that carries the water cooling, batteries and control electronics.
IEEE VR 2019, Osaka
Workshop · Lead organiser
Head-worn sensing is moving from lab prototypes to products people wear all day.
The fourth Eyewear Computing workshop gathered the community around large-scale studies in everyday settings, shared datasets and open tools for smart glasses and headsets.
UbiComp / ISWC 2021
Workshop · Co-organiser
A toolkit shapes who gets to design wearables and what they end up making.
A CHI workshop on the challenges and lessons of building, using and evaluating prototyping toolkits for smart garments and accessories.
CHI 2022, New Orleans
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I am an engineer and HCI researcher based in Tokyo. I hold a PhD in Media Design from Keio University, where I worked as a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher on wearable computing, physiological sensing, eye tracking and mixed reality. The work involved industry partners including NTT, NTT Data and JINS and was part of the JST CREST, JST PRESTO and Cybernetic Being Moonshot programmes.
I also build production software, most recently LLM products: evaluation tooling, search and full-stack applications. Details are in my CV.