CHILDHOOD: wearable suit for augmented child experience

Understanding and perceiving the world from a child's perspective is a very important key not only to design products and architecture, but also to remind staff who work closely with children, such as hospitals and kindergartens. Ida et al. investigated the universality of devices and architecture in public spaces by recording videos through a hand-held camera positioned at a child's eye level [Ida et al. 2010]. In this study, we propose a novel wearable suit called CHILDHOOD that virtually realizes a child's eye and hand movements by attaching a viewpoint translator and hand exoskeletons (Figure 1a). We hypothesized that virtualizing a child's body size by transforming our own body while preserving embodied interactions with actual surroundings would provide an augmented experience of a child's perspective. This could assist designers in evaluating product accessibility through their own body interactions in real time. In addition, augmented child experience can help staff and parents remember how children feel and touch the world.