Academic Journey Sharing | Chang Yingjie, Second-Year Master's Student: From One Summer to the Next

On July 7, 2025, Chang Yingjie, a second year master's student in Industrial Design Engineering at the School of Design, attended the DIS Conference held in Madeira, Portugal and gave a paper presentation. The paper "HapticWings: Enhancing the Experience of Extra Wing Motions in Virtual Reality through Dynamic 2D Weight Shifting”won the "Best Paper" award. At the invitation of his supervisor Prof. JE Seungwoo, Chang Yingjie shared the scientific research process behind this paper.

Information of DIS

DIS, the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, is a premier venue for research at the intersection of design, technology, and human experience. Organized by SIGCHI, ACM’s Special Interest Group on Human–Computer Interaction, the conference brings together scholars and practitioners to investigate interactive system design across interactive design, user-experience research, creative practice, and socially-oriented computing.

DIS has a strict academic review mechanism, and the acceptance rate of papers is low (about 24%), which reflects its high level and high influence. Each session will also select the Best Paper (about the top 5%) and Honorable Mention (about the top 10%) to recognize the most innovative and practical research results.

DIS is the premier, international arena where designers, artists, psychologists, user experience researchers, systems engineers, and many more, come together to debate and shape the future of interactive systems design and practice.

Professor Seungwoo Je: Starting from your own experience, how difficult is it to win the Best Paper Award?

Chang Yingjie: I want to tell a story from one summer to the next as my answer.

It was probably in July of last year when I wrote this very emo sentence:

"This is the season of fantasy... Many things coexist in a superimposed state, such as a strong surrounding and my lonely mood. The two opposing emotions of possession and loss can be harmoniously brought together in one space. I want to struggle, I call for an extreme struggle, as if to throw all my strength out in an instant and then become weak, expecting a result; however, things are not like this. The yelling is only for a moment; life is a long silence."

At that time, I should have been working hard to complete my research hardware prototype. Although the overall process of the user experiment has been decided, I am still desperately trying to identify any shortcomings in my thinking. One day at noon, I looked out the window, and the bright summer sunshine suddenly made me dizzy. I felt happy and confused, so I wrote the words above. Then began a summer of silent effort.

That summer, I first tested and improved my prototype. I was very nervous when I asked my classmates to help with the preliminary experiment for the first time. Initially, the equipment malfunctioned during operation because the printing material was not strong enough. The only thing I was glad about was that my classmates were not hurt. Many similar issues occurred at the beginning. There was a problem here or there, so I kept fixing it until it finally started running normally. Later, I began conducting user studies. In fact, there wasn’t much time left because the goal was to submit to a conference (CHI) with a deadline after September. If I remember correctly, I finished all the user experiments in less than two months. As far as I recall, I hardly had a proper break. I was always busy with conducting user studies and Unity development (hug myself here and thank all the students who participated in the experiments). After completing the user studies, I only had about 10 days left to write, so I kept writing and writing. Many friends in our group also wanted to submit to CHI, and our work and rest schedules became almost entirely random. Sometimes we were seen very early, and other times very late. It’s quite funny to think about. One time, when I was taking a shower, I suddenly had an idea. After my shower, I immediately biked to the laboratory and started typing on the keyboard.

Figure 3: The user is conducting an experiment.

In short, I successfully submitted the paper to CHI. I remember that my mood at that time was filled with the scorching heat of summer. After about two months, the result came out - I did try my best to throw the boomerang, but it came back and knocked me down. Failure is very disappointing. I was sad for a long time, but I realized I couldn't always dwell on this loss. I reflected carefully on the problems in the paper and spent a long time revising it. During this process, I added new content based on the reviewers' comments to make the results more complete and the logic clearer. I also read many published papers and analyzed how they crafted their storytelling. The conclusion was that almost all of them had to be rewritten, except for the study design part (crying face emoji). I kept working until I finished a version of the Discussion chapter that I was very happy with. I had other important things to do for a while, but whenever I had free time, I kept revising the paper. What impressed me most was that two or three days before the DIS conference submission, I happened to be in South Korea for academic conferences. During this period, I visited an Internet cafe in South Korea (I went there because I really wanted someone to accompany me, but I was too embarrassed to say it out loud), and completed nearly the last round of checking and revisions. At that time, I thought to myself, "I will not blame myself no matter what," and that was truly the only thought. No matter what the outcome was, I felt I had worked hard enough during that time, and any result was acceptable.

This time, the result was surprisingly good. I initially thought I would cry when this paper was accepted, but I didn't. I felt happy at that moment. The sense of relief I had been working so hard for finally arrived. Later, I received another email saying I won the "Best Paper," but instead of feeling proud, I felt pressured and started to panic. Before leaving for the conference, my supervisor asked me to practice my presentation at the group meeting. During the meeting, I attempted to use the extended screen to display the PowerPoint, but the device malfunctioned, and everyone noticed that I struggled with pronunciation while annotating in Chinese. Everyone wanted to laugh, but I had to hold back because once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. I gradually calmed down and finished my presentation. What surprised me most was when my supervisor showed everyone his first CHI PowerPoint, which had many annotations with Korean pronunciation; maybe this could be seen as a kind of mentorship. (laughs emoji)

If you ask me how difficult Best Paper is, this story might not be the best answer. If I really have to answer, I can only say: it’s very difficult, but I don’t know how to start. So I told the story of going from one summer to the next. However, it doesn’t matter what happened the past summer. What matters more is having a better summer now.

Brief introduction to my research

In virtual reality (VR), our virtual body can have different characteristics from our real body, such as appearance, size, and even extra body parts. Previous research shows that haptic feedback enhances the user-perceived embodiment of those dissimilar avatars. In particular, weight-shifting devices showed the potential to enhance arm deformation. However, there has been no exploration of using such techniques to enhance embodiment with extra body parts, like wings.

Figure 4: By wearing HapticWings, users can enhance their experience of the movement of additional virtual wings in virtual reality.

We introduce HapticWings, a back-wearable 2D weight-shifting device that provides haptic feedback for wing motions, enhancing the user embodiment of avatars with extra wings. In three user studies, we explored (1) users' abilities to recognize different weight-shifting motions provided by HapticWings, (2) users' perceived embodiment of avatars with extra wings when providing haptic feedback for wing motions, and (3) four possible applications and used two of them to evaluate users' sense of realism and enjoyment in VR.

Figure 5: Top view of the HapticWings device

Figure 6: Users enhance their experience in winged avatar applications by using HapticWings

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to my supervisor, Professor Seungwoo Je, for his guidance. Thanks to other authors of the paper, Chen Junyu, Lin Yilong, Zhang Xuesong, and the members of the immersive design group for their great help. Finally, I would like to thank myself.