Danlin Huang
Augmented Soma with Intelligence

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Body Oracle


2023-2025
Exploring Somatic Hieroglyphs for Collective Bodily Awareness.        


          



Concept



In today's information age, we predominantly communicate through text—messages and emails. According to Mehrabian's 7-38-55 rule, body language convey 55% meaning. Though emojis 😊😭🧎 help express emotion, digital communication remains fundamentally "disembodied". It will weakens may result in misunderstandings, communication breakdowns, decreased empathy, and diminished social support and well- being.

Both Western and Eastern vocabularies lack precise terminology for proprioception and social proprioception. This linguistic gap limits our ability to articulate and understand crucial concepts of embodied nonverbal interaction.
In response, we propose "Body Oracle," a computational linguistic speculative design project. We envision an "alternative present"  with an alternative language system capable of describing complex proprioceptions. Based on the inspiration from Chinese Oracle-Bone-Inscript, "Body Oracle" introduces AI-generated hieroglyphic characters that represent corporeal and intercorporeal poses, mapping the spatial relationships between bodies.

Inspiration: Chinese Oracle-Bone Inscriptions (OBI) is the earliest known form of Chinese writing. OBI were fundamentally pictographic: scribes created simplified outlines of animals, objects, and concepts for easy recognition. For example, the character for ‘old’ began as a simple drawing of a man with a crutch. 


Body Oracle System


Body Oracle Caster



Body Oracle Archive 


Body Oracle Translator






Body Oracle Caster


Body Oracle Caster is an interactive AI-generation tool. It features a  screen and a camera that immediately transforms user’ movements into AI-generated Body Oracle characters. These characters mimic the pictorial style of ancient Oracle Bone Inscriptions (OBI) while reflecting each user’s unique motion






Body Oracle Archive


Body Oracle Archive is a continually expanding collection of somatic hieroglyphic characters. When the Caster detects a pose that does not match any existing character in the Archive, it employs cGANs and Neural Style Transfer to create a new symbol that adheres to OBI aesthetics. A large language model (GPT4o) then assigns a corresponding pronunciation based on ancient Chinese phonetics. Over several months, we collected extensive pose data from both public participants and professional dancers, yielding a comprehensive movement dictionary that links each character to its pose and pronunciation.





Body Oracle Translator:


Body Oracle Translator is a handheld mixed reality (MR) device that helps audiences experience the Body Oracle language system. It recognizes and analyzes body poses in real time, then references the Archive to display the corresponding Body Oracle characters while providing audible pronunciation of the recognized characters.






We created a binocular-style, oracle bone–inspired MR mask to encase the HoloKit, a smartphone-based, open-source, optical see-through stereoscopic headset. The translator’s shell is made from a ready-made oracle bone. An iPhone is mounted inside, and the mask design leaves the phone’s camera unobstructed, enabling environment sensing while preserving the headset’s optical see-through view for users.

When a user holds this MR translator up to a human body, a fine-tuned YOLO11 Pose Estimation\footnote model (running on the iPhone) identifies the individual’s pose in real time and compares it against previously generated Body Oracle characters in the Archive. By pressing the button at the top of the phone’s screen, the device audibly pronounces the recognized character. The resulting character and its pronunciation are displayed at the center of the translator.


Audiences are experiencing Body Oracle Translator in TEI’25 Art and Performance Exhibition



Future Archaeology


We present this speculative design as a "future archaeology" experiential exhibition that traces the evolution of these hieroglyphs and envisions a world where proprioception forms the foundation of linguistic expression. Through this immersive "alternative present," audiences are encouraged to expand their bodily awareness. The experience creates an illusion that the "Body Oracle" language has existed for thousands of years—deeply embedded in our culture—inhabiting a world transformed by bodily communication.








Our contributions are threefold.

Revitalizing Ancient Heritage: We draw on the wisdom of ancient Chinese Oracle Bone Inscriptions, adapting their pictographic simplicity through AI generation to create an intuitive, cross-cultural language that fosters collective bodily awareness.
Experiential Alternative Present: We combine soma design and speculative design to immerse audiences in an interactive environment, prompting them to explore how a body-centered language system might alter their perception of self and others.
Pathway to Somaesthetic Futures: Our audience feedback, gathered from exhibition participants, suggests that engaging with Body Oracle enhances somatic awareness and bodily conceptualization. This points toward a future where these somatic characters could complement traditional text-based communication to foster collective bodily awareness.

As Wittgenstein famously asserted, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Drawing on the principle of linguistic relativity, we contend that introducing these alternative somatic hieroglyphic signs may reshape our collective semantic cognition of bodily awareness. By acting as a sociolinguistic mediator, Body Oracle serves as a "true oracle" that can help us conceptualize, describe, and ultimately transform our social reality through a reimagined embodiment of language.


Exhibition & Publication


ISEA  2025, Artist Talk. Seoul, Korea.
Siggraph Aisa 2025, XR. Hong Kong, China.
CVPR 2025, AI Art Gallery. Nashville TN, USA.
IJCAI 2025, AI Art Gallery. Montreal, Canada.
TEI 25, Art & Performance. Bordeaux, France.
China National Art Exhibition (全国美展) 2024. Chongqing, China.
DIgital Art China (首届中国数字艺术大展). Hangzhou, China.  

[P1] Danlin Huang, Ke Huang, Ruoqi Wang, Botao Amber Hu. 2025. Body Oracle: Exploring Somatic
Hieroglyphs for Collective Bodily Awareness. In Expanded 2025. Art Paper. [ Accepted ] 

[D1] Danlin Huang, Ke Huang, Ruoqi Wang, Botao Amber Hu. 2025. “Body Oracle” Translator: Translating Body Postures into Speculative Hieroglyphs. In Proceeding of SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 (SA '25). Extended Reality. [ Under Revision ]

[D2] Ke Huang, Danlin Huang, Cun Lin, Botao Amber Hu. 2025. Body Oracle. In 19 th International Conference on Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI’ 25). Art and Performance. []