Palpable Night Forest

Human and nature have been disconnected in the modern era—both physical separation and psychological alienation. Rapid urbanization has pushed nature far away from our daily lives. The fields and mountains that were once nearby are now difficult to reach for many city dwellers, disrupting the first-hand, bodily experiences that ground human-nature relationships.

To reconnect humans with nature, recent Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) studies have sought to engage with remote natural environments, bringing wilderness into daily life to provide rich sensory experiences often lacking within urban constraints.

These attempts include not only providing remote screens through user-deployed or user-built cameras but also replicating natural phenomena like ocean waves as kinetic art. Furthermore, some researchers have explored sensory embodiment, such as translating wind into a tactile experience on a garment.

While remote connections to nature have expanded to all times of day, systems capable of representing nocturnal environments still mainly rely on audiovisual means, such as live-streamed night-vision cameras. However, these modalities are insufficient to convey the unique and rich experience of the dark wilderness—imagine walking through a dark mountain trail that feels eerie, or a humid, rainy night stroll with wind blowing across a sea-facing beach.

In this context, we propose a different approach that enables users to remotely experience distant natural environments from indoor spaces by involving various modalities—tactile, auditory, olfactory—along with ritual qualities.

We focus on non-visual approaches, as scholars such as Edensor argue that restricted vision heightens other senses—like the feeling of air on the skin—creating a unique sensory richness, which we believe nocturnal nature inherently possesses. Additionally, as Griffiths and de Bézenac note, efforts to connect humans with the non-visual, multisensory aspects of nocturnal nature remain limited, highlighting a compelling opportunity for exploration.