Conspiratio


'Yuki Hashimoto Yuki Hashimoto

Conspiratio is an art installation that enables a virtual experience of the sensations of drinking. Our purpose is to acquaint people through this work with the happiness, well-being and pleasures involved in drinking.
Usually when we eat and drink, we enjoy the sensation of drinking with our mouths and lips, with the senses of taste and smell at the same time. In adition, there is an item available worldwide that gives the pleasure of sucking-cigarettes. Of course, the reason why smokers cannot give up cigarettes is their addiction to nicotine. However, another essential reason for their smoking is the pleasure experienced when sucking.

The instinctive act of babies immediately after birth in order to survive is to drink when the nipple on a breast touches their mouths. Furthermore, sucking gives them a feeling of comfort for the first time in their lives. In addition, babies want to put everything they see in their mouths. This is because the stimulation that comes from their lips and mouths is extremely interesting since it contains a great deal of information on the external world. Thus, the drinking sensation is a kind of essential pleasure.
We have produced Conspiratio using a straw that is based on the action of “drinking.” And on the subject of drinking, we have managed to separate and extract the sensation of drinking from the taste and smell, and present for the first time ever a pleasurable and exciting sensation for the lips and mouth.

In this work, players can experience the sensation of drinking foods. After choosing the picture of a food they would like, they drink using the SUI (Straw-like User Interface), a revolutionary interface system that allows a virtual experience of the sensations of drinking. Thus virtual drinking sensations can be felt. To make this work a more interesting experience, we included the element of hunting in it. Comic characters shouldering food are projected on the screen. The player can drink food by chasing and catching the characters, and this enables users to enjoy the work even more.

To reproduce the sensation of drinking accurately, we first drank actual foods/liquids and recorded the necessary data; we then used it in the work. This data made it possible to produce a sensation that was highly accurate, and real. We are also pursuing the concept of the pleasures of drinking by extracting only the sensation of drinking without presenting taste and smell.
By interacting with this work, you will, we are sure, appreciate the wonders involved in the act of drinking.

Project Team
Yuki Hashimoto, Minoru Kojima, Tomoyasu Mitani, Satoru Miyajima, Naohisa Nagaya, Akio Yamamoto: Inami Laboratory, Graduate School of Electro-Communications, University of Electro-Communications, Japan
Junichiro Ohtaki: Yamada Laboratory, Graduate School of Electro-Communications, University of Electro-Communications, Japan
Masahiko Inami: Associate Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Intelligent Systems, University of Electro-Communications, Japan