Humans have a natural curiosity to imagine what it feels like to exist as someone or something else. This curiosity becomes even stronger for the pets we care for. Humans cannot truly know what it is like to be our pets, but we can deepen our understanding of what it is like to perceive and explore the world like them. We investigate how wearables can offer people animal perspective-taking opportunities to experience the world through animal senses that differ from those biologically natural to us. To assess the potential of wearables in animal perspective-taking, we developed a sensory-augmenting wearable that gives wearers cat-like whiskers. We then created a maze exploration experience where blindfolded participants utilized the whiskers to navigate the maze. We draw on animal behavioral research to evaluate how the whisker activity supported authentically cat-like experiences, and discuss the implications of this work for future learning experiences. Posthumanist philosophies characterize the human body as "the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate" [22] , and suggest the idea that augmenting or substituting aspects of this prosthesis is the normal progression for humanity. Technology allows humans to enhance senses that may be impaired, and to extend our bodies with added senses beyond what we would otherwise be biologically limited by-giving humans the ability to improve their quality of life [17, 18] . "In short, we are cyborgs" [21] . Scholars have investigated how immersive virtual environments can enhance social perspective-taking [20, 47] , and computer-augmented, embodied perspective-taking has been shown to encourage a productive "learning stance" [33] and to enhance both conceptual learning and engagement [15, 34] . Some environmental education scholars [40, 54] and indigenous educational scholars [5] have suggested that building relational ties to non-human actors in nature may contribute to environmental and biology education. In a few cases, educators have asked learners to take on the embodied experiences of insects such as bees [15] and animals such as polar bears [37] . Danish found that children enacting a computer-augmented pollination activity embodying the roles of bees helped them learn nuances of individual and aggregate bee behavior; Lyons and colleagues found that wearable polar bear paws that simulated the feeling of traversing melting polar ice enabled people to show an empathetic understanding of the impacts of climate change. For many people, the most common experience they will have with entities who have different sensory capabilities is through everyday interaction with pets or neighborhood animals. For example, in noticing that our house cat is navigating a dark space where we would likely bump into something, we may recognize the limits of our own senses and consider how our pets' experiences are both similar to and different from our own. Our work explores how embodied technology can mediate human experiences in ways that offer people opportunities to explore and relate to the animal-like behaviors of their pets. We present the design of a cat-inspired whiskers wearable, the Whisker Beard, and an embodied navigation activity that provided a firsthand perspective-taking experience for participants curious about what it might be like to have whiskers. In addition, we discuss our philosophy of what it means for an animal-imitating experience to be authentic and we present the evaluation framework we used to understand how our whiskers activity encouraged participants to behave like cats. Our study addresses two research questions: In what ways can we create technologies and environments that remediate human experiences to be like those of non-humans? RQ2: What are humans' impressions of these technologically remediated experiences? In this paper we describe (1) the design of a sensory augmentation whiskers wearable; (2) the creation of a maze exploration activity for testing the experience of wearing whiskers; (3) our analysis methods for evaluating the authenticity of an animallike experience; and (4) outline opportunities to extend this work, as well as discuss the implications of it. The results of the Whisker Beard and maze activity show examples of participants exhibiting behaviors and strategies similar to those that animals perform when searching for resources in unfamiliar environments. We separate our results into discussions about their physical behaviors and strategies, as well as their impressions of the experience. As depicted in Figure 5 and Table 1 , as participants explored the maze, they alternated between periods of explorative and exploitative behavior as they switched between using their whiskers and using their hands. Participants spent, on average, a longer amount of time exploring and moving through than maze than they spent hand swiping to look for mice. These results are in line with animal foraging behaviors [9, 41] . Benichou et al. says that animals searching for resources switch between periods of motion and periods of searching. In addition, their work shows that intervals of exploration tend to be longer than intervals of exploitation. This aligns with the amount of time our participants dedicated to these behaviors [9] . While we cannot claim that participants would not have enacted similar exploration-exploitation behaviors without whiskers, we can say that the behaviors that they enacted with whiskers were in line with foraging behaviors. Interestingly, several of the participants made use of the whiskers in ways that strikingly resembled cat behavior, as depicted in Figure 8 . As participants moved down long passages, some used their whiskers to gauge the width of the passage by moving back and forth brushing each side of their whiskers on the opposing walls. This demonstrates that participants used the whiskers to enhance their spatial awareness, one of the supposed evolutionary factors behind the presence of whiskers [11] . We noticed that when participants used techniques B and C, they mimicked the behavior of cats who rub their olfactory face glands on objects to mark their scent, as well to get a sense for the physical properties of a specific object [48] . While this behavior in cats is not necessarily used for navigation purposes, it is used for gauging the size and shape of an object. Participants did this in order to look for hidden passageways and moveable obstacles. Our observations of participants' geocentric and egocentric behaviors provided us with a fuller picture of how participants used the whiskers in tandem with other strategies during the activity. Participants relied on the vibrotactile feedback from the Whisker Beard in determining their path of movement through the maze. In addition to the vibrotactile feedback, we found that participants also relied on the sounds the whiskers made as they brushed against the maze's cardboard surfaces. We validated this observation through think-aloud commentary that participants provided throughout the maze, and through post-maze group discussion. The fact that participants relied on additional tactics beyond the vibrations is not an inauthentic outcome, but rather a reasonable one. Participants' use of different egocentric and geocentric tactics is naturally aligned with how animals navigate the world-getting the most information from their environment by whatever means are accessible to them [41] . The blindfolded maze procedure afforded participants the ability to experience the Whisker Beard in an unfamiliar environment. As expected, due to the unfamiliarity of the environment, participants relied on more geocentric strategies. These results are in line with animal navigation research which suggests that egocentric strategies are too difficult to use when exploring new terrain, and therefore animals rely more heavily on geocentric strategies to gather real-time physical feedback [41] . In time, participants who revisited areas of the maze began to recognize their surroundings, which led them to use internal recall from their memory to identify their approximate position; however, because they were blindfolded they still had to rely on geocentric strategies as well. Unsurprisingly, participants told us that being blindfolded and losing their sense of sight was disorienting for them; sight is one of humans', and cats', dominant senses for obtaining information about an environment [50] . Participants described the open-space areas of the maze as "disorienting" and tended to try to find a wall as quickly as they could to reorient themselves. The level of consistent wall-hugging that participants exhibited is in line with experiments where increased levels of anxiety correlated to higher levels of thigmotaxis. Usually, animals' tendency to hug the wall would decrease as an experiment went on, except in circumstances where animals do not have enough time to fully process their environment [57] . In our experiment, blindfolding the participants made it challenging for them to produce an accurate internal map of the space, leading them to continuously avoid open areas and rely on vibrotactile and audio feedback from the walls during navigation. The participants' reflections during the maze and post-maze show promising beginnings to meaningful discussions of animal empathy, as many drew connections to prior experiences of pets who were blind, deaf, or had their whiskers cut off and discussed how disorienting and difficult it would be for them to navigate with a sense removed. Participants described the whiskers as feeling like an extra sense, one that they were able to adapt to even in a short timeframe. Although losing their sight was disorienting, they were able to utilize the whiskers as a substitute for being able to "see." The combination of the Whisker Beard and maze activity suggests that through disorienting them and having them behave like a cat, they were able to consider what it would be like to be a cat relying on its whiskers every day, and how challenging it would be for a cat who has no whiskers at all. Wearable technologies and embodied learning experiences free humans from the confines of their biological limitations. This enables researchers to provide low-cost opportunities that offer firsthand perspective-taking experiences for people, allowing people to experiment with new sensory interactions, including ones that non-human animals have access to. We presented the design of the Whisker Beard, which does just that-provides humans with the opportunity to experience what it would be like to have a new sense, in this case, what it would be like to have whiskers. We introduced concepts from animal behavioral science research and described how we applied it to evaluating the experiences of participants' while immersed in an animal perspective-taking activity. Our observations of participants' enactment of animal-like behaviors, as well as their impressions about the experience suggest that they were immersed in the sensory experience of being a cat with whiskers. We are actively iterating on the designs of our hardware to offer more customizability. This will enable participants to design their own sensory augmenting technologies where they can explore their own curiosities about their pets' other senses. In near-future experiments we will iterate on the design of the wearable activity to offer a more immersive experience where participants can continue to enact animal-like behaviors. Our next steps will then be to investigate how participants developing increased awareness of animals' sensory experiences can support their enactment of empathetically-oriented design activities focused on improving animals' quality of life.
This paper explores using wearable sensory augmenting technology to facilitate first-hand perspective-taking of what it is like to have cat-like whiskers.
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