2024
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
What is it like to be a bat?
EchoVision is an interactive mixed reality artwork directed by Jiabao Li and Botao Amber Hu. Visitors lift a bat-shaped mask, make a sound, and watch waves of light travel across the people, walls, and objects around them. Their voices become a way to explore a familiar place through an unfamiliar sensory relationship.
The work asks how mixed reality can bring ecological knowledge into an embodied encounter. Inspired by Thomas Nagel’s question, “What is it like to be a bat?”, it approaches another animal’s perceptual world through an artistic simulation. The installation invites curiosity about bats while retaining the distance between a human interpretation and a bat’s own subjective experience.
EchoVision at Plásmata 3, Athens, 2025. Photograph: Pinelopi Gerasimou / Onassis Stegi. From Jiabao Li’s project archive.
A mask made to be shared
EchoVision’s custom housing surrounds a smartphone-based, optical see-through HoloKit headset. The iPhone camera and LiDAR scanner remain exposed so that the system can reconstruct the surrounding space. Visitors see the actual environment through the optics, with stereoscopic visual effects layered over it.
The four masks draw on different bat species, including the pallid bat and Brazilian free-tailed bat native to the Austin region. Their simplified forms emphasize distinctive ears, noses, and faces. The design team modeled the housings in Rhino, resin-printed them, and painted them by hand. A Velcro attachment connects each mask to HoloKit’s headpad, with the original headband removed.
Claw-like handles turn the headset into a handheld object. They let visitors raise it to their face, lower it to talk, and pass it to the next person without fitting a strap. The same handles allow the masks to hang upside down from a rail, rope, or branch. Detachable parts make the installation easier to transport and maintain. These choices are documented in the SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Art Paper.
Four bat-shaped masks suspended by their handles. Design documentation from Danlin Huang; photographer not identified on the source page.
Drawings of the mask housing and handles. From Danlin Huang’s design documentation.
Seeing a voice move through space
The installation combines live microphone input with the three-dimensional surroundings reconstructed by the phone’s LiDAR scanner. In the published design, voice volume changes the brightness and spread of the visual waves; pitch changes their thickness and reach. Particles appear where the waves encounter surfaces. Recognized human bodies receive golden waves and additional particles, encouraging visitors to call toward one another and explore the experience together.
LiDAR provides the geometry for this visual interpretation. The mask does not measure the returning acoustic echoes of the visitor’s voice. Instead, EchoVision uses an artistic mapping between voice, light, and spatial form to make the idea of echolocation available to human sight. The responsive effects connect a visitor’s action to the room or landscape they actually occupy.
Visual studies of the sound-responsive environment. From Danlin Huang’s project documentation.
Beginning at Austin’s bat bridge
EchoVision’s first outdoor presentation took place beneath Austin’s Congress Avenue Bridge, in collaboration with bat conservationist Merlin Tuttle and the Host: Fusebox program at The Contemporary Austin. Visitors heard stories about bat conservation, passed the masks among friends and family, and watched the bridge’s bats emerge at dusk.
The final SIGGRAPH Asia paper reports more than 200 participants at this pop-up event. Its design reflection describes how the masks attracted passersby, made turn-taking quick, and allowed wearers and bystanders to remain involved in the same social setting. This is an account of a public artwork and its design lessons; the paper does not establish a measured causal improvement in empathy or conservation behavior.
Austin presentation. Photograph courtesy of Merlin Tuttle’s Bat Conservation.
The work’s eco-phenomenological approach begins with this encounter: ecological knowledge, bodily action, and a specific habitat come together. Visitors can experiment with another way of sensing while standing beside the animals whose lives prompted the work.
EchoVision and Nocturnal Fugue
EchoVision is frequently presented alongside Nocturnal Fugue, the audiovisual work directed by Jiabao Li and Matt McCorkle. Nocturnal Fugue transforms bat vocalizations into composed soundscapes and projected habitats; EchoVision provides the handheld, voice-responsive mixed reality experience. The two works meet in a shared exploration of bat perception and communication, with distinct creative credits. Signals’ exhibition record documents both works and their respective teams.
Jiabao Li with an EchoVision mask during the Ars Electronica presentation, 2024. From Jiabao Li’s archive; photographer not identified on the source page.
In the exhibition
The handheld format has traveled between parks, galleries, festivals, and research demonstrations. At Plásmata 3, the masks hung among the trees of Pedion tou Areos in Athens. At FACT Liverpool, EchoVision and Nocturnal Fugue formed part of the rotating Art Plays Games exhibition. These settings place the same voice-driven interaction in different relationships with landscape, projected habitat, and public gathering.
Masks installed among the trees at Plásmata 3, 2025. Photograph: Pinelopi Gerasimou / Onassis Stegi.
A visitor lifts a mask at Plásmata 3. Photograph: Andreas Simopoulos / Onassis Stegi.
Visitors trying EchoVision at a conference demonstration. From Danlin Huang’s project archive; photographer not identified on the source page.
Publications
The six-author papers below credit Botao Amber Hu, Jiabao Li, Danlin Huang, Jianan Johanna Liu, Xiaobo Aaron Hu, and Yilan Elan Tao, in that order. Botao Amber Hu and Jiabao Li are credited as equal contributors in the SIGGRAPH Asia Art Paper.
- 2025 — Seeing with Sound: Demonstrating “EchoVision”, a Mixed Reality Simulation of Bat Echolocation. Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Interactivity, Yokohama, Japan. Paper.
- 2025 — Demonstrating “EchoVision”: Mixed Reality Sensory Substitution with Bat Echolocation. Proceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 2025. Demo, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Best Demo Award. Paper · Conference award record.
- 2025 — EchoVision. 2025 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW). XR Gallery, Saint-Malo, France. Paper.
- 2024 — Becoming Bats with “EchoVision”: Towards Eco-Phenomenological Mixed Reality. SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Art Papers. Tokyo, Japan. Seven-page account of the mask design, interaction, Austin pop-up, and eco-phenomenological approach. Paper.
- 2024 — EchoVision: Experiencing Bat Echolocation via Mixed Reality. SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 XR. Tokyo, Japan. Paper.
- 2024 — EchoVision: A Handheld Mixed Reality Mask for Experiencing Bat Echolocation. Companion of the 2024 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing. UbiComp/ISWC Design Exhibition, Melbourne, Australia. Paper.
Related publication: Jiabao Li, Matt McCorkle, and Botao Amber Hu. 2024. Becoming Bat. Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium. Pictorial, Santa Cruz, USA. Paper.
Exhibitions and demonstrations
2026
- FILE São Paulo 2026, FIESP Cultural Center, São Paulo, Brazil — EchoVision. Outdoor presentation, 19–30 August. FILE artwork archive · Festival announcement.
2025
- CURRENTS Art & Technology Festival, Santa Fe, USA — EchoVision. Festival artist archive.
- Plásmata 3, Pedion tou Areos, Athens, Greece, 27 May–15 June — EchoVision, presented by Onassis. Exhibition record.
- Millennium Docs Against Gravity: MDAG Vision, State Ethnographic Museum, Warsaw, Poland, 12–18 May — EchoVision. Festival program.
- CHI Interactivity, Yokohama, Japan — Seeing with Sound: Demonstrating EchoVision. Proceedings.
- Augmented Humans, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 16–20 March — EchoVision demonstration; Best Demo Award. Conference.
- IEEE VR XR Gallery, Saint-Malo, France, 10–12 March — EchoVision. Gallery program.
- SXSW XR Experience, Austin, USA — EchoVision. Festival listing.
- FACT: Art Plays Games, Liverpool, UK, 14 January–2 March — Nocturnal Fugue and EchoVision. Artwork · Exhibition schedule.
2024
- SIGGRAPH Asia XR, Tokyo, Japan — EchoVision. Proceedings.
- IEEE VIS Arts Program (VISAP) — EchoVision artwork presentation, 15 October. Program and artist credits.
- UbiComp/ISWC Design Exhibition, Melbourne, Australia — EchoVision handheld mask. Proceedings.
- Signals / Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancouver, Canada — Nocturnal Fugue paired with EchoVision. Exhibition record.
- Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria — Nocturnal Fugue / Becoming Bat with EchoVision. Festival listing.
- Sheffield DocFest, Alternate Realities, Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK, 12–17 June — Nocturnal Fugue with the mixed reality masks. Festival record.
- Host: Fusebox / The Contemporary Austin, Austin, USA — outdoor EchoVision encounter and Nocturnal Fugue performance. Program.
Jiabao Li’s exhibition archive additionally records 2024 presentations at TANK Art Festival and West Bund Art Festival in Shanghai; New Matter of Nexus at Wuzhen World Internet Science and Technology Museum; and f.l.i.p. × Lapin et Halot, interactivité in Tokyo.
Talks and recognition
- ISEA 2025 Artist Talk — EchoVision: What Is It Like to Be a Bat? SNU Power Plant, Seoul, South Korea, 28 May 2025. This was an artist talk. Symposium archive.
- Best Demo, Augmented Humans 2025. The conference lists the demonstration under its program title, Demonstrating “EchoVision”: Augmenting Human with Bat Echolocation via Handheld Mixed Reality Masks; the proceedings use the title listed above. Award record.
- Related work: AUREA #7 Creative Award — Nocturnal Fugue. The award organizer names Nocturnal Fugue as the winning work. Award record.
Try EchoVision
Download EchoVision on the App Store. The listing includes iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision. The handheld installation described above uses a LiDAR-equipped iPhone with HoloKit and the custom bat mask.
Credits
Director: Botao Amber Hu
Director: Jiabao Li
Interaction Engineer: Botao Amber Hu
Interaction Designer: Jiabao Li
Technical Artist: Xiaobo Aaron Hu
Product Designer: Jianan Johanna Liu
Product Designer: Danlin Huang
Research Assistant: Yilan Tao
Project contributors: Botao Amber Hu, Jiabao Li, Danlin Huang, Jianan Johanna Liu, Xiaobo Aaron Hu, Yilan Tao