"My Happiness Makes You Smile": Towards Understanding Telepathic Superpower Design via Brain-Muscle Interfaces

In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, there is growing interest in designing superpowers, abilities that extend beyond natural human limits and are experienced as originating from one's own body.While superpower designs hold the promise of enhancing human capabilities, they may also introduce negative side effects as superpower interactions transition from short demonstrations to integration into everyday life.To explore the positive and negative side effects of superpower design, we developed "EmoPals," a system inspired by telepathy superpower.EmoPals detects one user's emotions through a brain-computer interface and replicates them on the other user's face through electrical muscle stimulation, therefore one user's happiness makes the other smile and vice versa.This system demonstrates both the potential to strengthen emotional connections and the risks of amplifying negative emotions or causing social discomfort.