^{Being a Giraffe}

^{^{Embodied Locomotion Interfaces for Non-Human Morphology in VR}}

Duration
2023 – 2024

Researcher
Hanju Seo

Affiliation
- Imperial College London · Dyson School of Design Engineering
- Royal College of Art · School of Design

Role
- Principal Investigator
- Hardware Designer (custom locomotion controllers)
- Interaction Designer (embodied VR experience)

Collaborator
- Rian Stephens from XR Lab, RCA

Conference
- IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VRW), 2026

Award
- Innovate UK Immersive Tech Awards 2024 - Best Technical Innovation

Exhibition
- IEEE VR 2026, Daegu, South Korea
- Innovate UK Immersive Tech Awards Showcase, London, 2024
- Across & Over, HSBC HQ, London, 2023

What do you know about giraffes? Long neck, yellow, spotted. Most people answer this way, and the knowledge dates back to childhood. We carry a child's summary of a living animal into adulthood and rarely think to revise it. Being a Giraffe began as a question about this gap: not what we know about another species, but what we have never been given the means to feel. The project developed a VR system in which users physically enact the locomotion of a giraffe through custom-built controllers, translating the morphological constraints of a four-legged, long-necked animal into a first-person bodily experience.

The system asks a more fundamental question than what a giraffe looks like: what does it mean to move as one? The controllers were designed to make the user's body unfamiliar to itself, imposing the mechanical logic of a different anatomy onto human movement. This productive disorientation is the core of the research. Rather than presenting the giraffe as an object of observation, the project proposes that understanding a living being may require inhabiting its physical grammar, however approximately, before any deeper knowledge becomes possible.

It was presented at the Innovate UK Immersive Tech Awards Showcase, where it received Best Technical Innovation, and subsequently published at the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces in 2026.

Custom locomotion controller prototypes, Unreal Engine environment setup, and users experiencing the VR system.