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 impressions of other species shaped by childhood picture books and curated media into adulthood, and rarely think to revise them. 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.
Controllers shaped after the form of a giraffe's forelegs are designed to make the user's body unfamiliar to itself. When familiar movement begins to follow the logic of a different anatomy, that strangeness becomes the core of the research. Rather than presenting the giraffe as an object of observation, Being a Giraffe proposes that understanding a living being may require passing through its physical logic with one's own body.
The project 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.
Being a Giraffe - VR locomotion system.
Custom locomotion controller prototypes, Unreal Engine environment setup, and users experiencing the VR system.