Awards

• WIRED CREATIVE HACK AWARD 2025, Young Creator Award
• NYAA 2025 (student CG contest)
  • Excellence Award, Game & Interaction
  • Canon Marketing Japan Award
  • NEW CHITOSE GENIUS Award
• AIxR Creative Award, finalist

Conference

• ACM CHI 2026, Interactive Demo (acceptance rate 21%)

Team

薛 博文 : team leader & technical architect

Genta Ono: director (creative & technical)

姚 思妤 : designer

吉田 翼 : lead engineer

王 文鶴: special thanks

"Playable SF prototyping" that shifts how you see yourself

Pick up the payphone and "you from another world" answers in your own voice, and you can talk. It is "another you" living in a world line with a different social background and values. Someone who is in fact a complete stranger speaks to you in your voice, and somehow feels like you. Through talking with a being between self and other, the piece explores the blurred line between what concerns us and what concerns others.

The piece turns the thought experiment "what if I had been born in a different position?" into something felt, and tries to build a sense of ownership through experience. Rather than treating the line between self and other as fixed, it presents it as something that keeps shifting through interaction. A problem you thought was someone else's may not have been so far away after all — through that realisation, it aims for an experience that makes you care a little more about other people's problems.

How it goes

1. The phone is ringing
2. Pick up the receiver and dial "001#"
3. You reach a service that connects you to yourself in another world, and voice guidance begins
4. Press "#" to accept the consent terms
5. Asked your name, you answer aloud
6. Answer three questions: "what you ate yesterday and how it was", "what you want to achieve now" and "what you want to do in the future"
7. The call reaches you in another world, and the conversation begins
8. When the conversation ends, a receipt summarising it prints out

Design points

Interaction design To get people to pick up the receiver and start, a display guides them and the phone rings. Creating the sight of "someone laughing while talking on the phone" draws visitors in with little explanation.

The phone-booth metaphor As with Doraemon's "what-if phone booth" or urban legends, it borrows the payphone's image as something that "might connect to another world", making the premise more convincing.

Made for sharing The printed receipt turns an audio-only experience into something you can share as an image.

How the idea came about, and a fast proof of concept

It began with a teammate's idea of "meeting an avatar of yourself from another world". Hearing it, I proposed a payphone where you talk to an AI with your own voice, using ElevenLabs' voice-cloning API. Keeping it audio-only made the other you feel real, and the payphone form factor made the connection to another world more convincing.