OryLab Presentation: Relation Technology. A Theory Into How Robotics Can Help Fill an Existing Gap in the Perception of Oneself.

By Aki Yuki, Akira Shuei, and Kentaro Yoshifuji (Tokyo)

This presentation invites a philosophical rethinking of embodiment, agency, and social participation in an age of technological mediation. It begins from a familiar yet insufficiently examined problem: the persistence of loneliness and isolation despite material progress and increased life expectancy. For those whose bodies constrain movement, the world contracts—not only physically, but socially and existentially. What, then, does it mean to “be present,” to “act,” or to “belong”?

Through the development of teleoperated robots such as OriHime, the presentation challenges the assumption that agency is bound to the biological body. These robotic intermediaries enable users to work, communicate, and inhabit social roles at a distance, raising fundamental questions about the locus of the self. If one can act, be recognized, and form relationships through a mediated body, where does personhood reside? In the flesh, in perception, or in interaction?

The project reframes mobility, dialogue, and purpose as conditions for meaningful participation, suggesting that social existence is less about physical co-presence than about reciprocal recognition. By enabling individuals to reclaim roles within society, this technology blurs the boundary between absence and presence, dependence and autonomy.

Ultimately, the presentation offers not merely a technological solution, but a discussion on “Ikigai”, the joy of living, a provocation into: that freedom may lie not in the body’s capacity to move, but in the ability to be acknowledged as an agent among others.