KAIST

<(From Left) Professor Chang Hee Lee, Ph.D candidate Yoonji Lee>

A new type of digital game has emerged in which plants themselves change characters in the game, while humans observe and emotionally engage with them.

KAIST announced on the 15th of May that a research team led by Professor Chang Hee Lee of the Department of Industrial Design won the Best Paper Award at ACM CHI 2026, the most prestigious conference in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), for research that uses plants not as simple decorations or sensors but as “agents of interaction.”

< Plant.play system image >

< Plant.play system side view photo >

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) CHI (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) 2026 was held from April 13 to 17 in Barcelona, Spain. CHI is one of the world’s most prestigious international conferences in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

The Best Paper Award is the highest honor awarded to only about the top 1% of all submitted papers. In particular, this year’s conference received a total of 6,730 paper submissions, marking the largest scale in its history, and this award is regarded as an achievement demonstrating the global research competitiveness of KAIST researchers.

Professor Chang Hee Lee’s team proposed a new form of interaction in which plants directly participate in digital games through the paper “When Plants Play: Rethinking Plant Materiality in Digital Games.”

This research is characterized by a design that goes beyond the conventional approach of using plants simply as sensors or decorative elements, allowing changes in the plant’s state to directly affect the progress of the game. The research team reflected the plant’s bioelectrical signals, environmental data, and circadian rhythms (biological changes that repeat according to day and night) in the game, enabling the character in the game to change according to the plant’s state. Rather than directly controlling the game, users participate by observing and interpreting the plant’s changes and responses.

As the plant grows, it creates different forms of characters and changes, and these changes reflect the plant’s own growth patterns and pace of transformation.

As a result of conducting user research in an actual exhibition environment, the research team confirmed that participants accepted the plant’s slow and unpredictable changes as a form of “play.” In particular, participants also showed a tendency to become emotionally immersed in and empathize with both the plant and the virtual character in the game. This led them to perceive the plant not simply as an object of observation, but as an entity with which they interact.

<A digital pet raised by the plant shows various behaviors—such as reading books—according to its daily rhythm, and grows over time>

<In a low-humidity environment, the plant provides hamburgers to the digital pet to help it grow>

This research received high recognition for moving beyond human-centered digital interaction and proposing new possibilities for interaction with nonhuman entities such as plants.

Professor Chang Hee Lee stated, “This research is an attempt to view nonhuman entities such as plants as agents and explore new forms of interaction,” adding, “Our society is expanding into an ‘attachment economy,’ which values emotional bonds and empathy, and in the future, emotional engagement not only with humans but also with diverse nonhuman entities such as AI, robots, animals, and plants will become important.” He continued, “This research is an example that demonstrates these new possibilities for interaction.”

This study, with doctoral student Yoonji Lee as the first author and Professor Chang Hee Lee as the corresponding author, can be found in the ACM Digital Library.
※ Paper title: “When Plants Play: Rethinking Plant Materiality in Digital Games”
※ DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791373

This research was supported by Brain Korea (BK21).