ZooWear: Animal-Inspired Head-Mounted Haptic Interfaces to Augment the Zoo Experience

Zoos play a crucial role in public education and wildlife engagement, yet traditional visits often lack interactive elements that foster meaningful connections between visitors and animals. In this paper, we introduce ZooWear, a head-mounted wearable featuring cartoon-style animal ears that provides haptic feedback patterns simulating an animal’s reactions to other species in the food chain. With ZooWear, we focused on examining its effectiveness in affording perspective-taking during human-animal encounters, promoting embodied knowledge retention, and enriching the zoo experiences. We first conducted a between-subject experiment in lab-based virtual zoo visits to evaluate its effectiveness in creating effective learning experiences and enhancing connections to wildlife. This was followed by a real-world zoo experiment, which showed that ZooWear promoted nature connectedness and enabled more emotionally and socially engaging experiences. Our findings highlight the potential of integrating perspective-taking into zoo experiences through animal-inspired wearables, embodied sensory feedback, and narrative-driven experiences.