NISHIMURA Yuri, ECHIGO Hiroki, OHNAKA Kenta, KITABATAKE Kousuke, KUWAMIYA Yo, KOBAYASHI Minoru received the Cyberspace Research Award at the Cyber Space and Virtual City Research Committee of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan (VRSJ).
The title of the award-winning paper is “A Study on the Perception of Weight When Grasping 3D-Printed Objects.”
This research explores the possibility of treating the subjective perception of weight as a design target by adjusting the internal structure of 3D-printed objects—such as infill ratio and material distribution—to modify their mass properties.
In the awarded paper, the researchers created 3D-printed samples of a hammer and a trophy that had identical external appearances but differed only in their internal structures. By having participants grasp and handle the objects, they conducted an exploratory investigation into how perceived weight relates to impressions such as an object’s “authenticity” or its perceived “value.”
For future work, the researchers aim to establish a framework that organizes the factors influencing weight perception into designable parameters, and to develop a method that allows designers to derive concrete structural specifications from a desired subjective experience of weight.