Trade shows might be sexier, but there’s no beating academic conferences for weird new tech. Today, at the 27th Software and Technology Symposium in Honolulu, dozens of researchers presented a glimpse into the future of UI design—here are six of the most interesting. Meanwhile, you can find me at “Beach Activities.”

Haptic Turk is a prototype game that uses your friends as virtual robots to do immersive motion simulation at home. The research project from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany demoed a flight simulator variant at CHI2014 last week: the player wears 3D goggles and lies in two slings held by four friends—the “human actuators” or turkers. A fifth can do special effects, inventing sensations with whatever is on hand.

Attendees at a Human-Computer Interaction conference in Toronto earlier this week found toilets that claimed to analyze each “deposit” and post it online. Don’t like that idea? Then go somewhere else.

Libraries have terrible maps; supermarkets and department stores have bad signage; all of them have a built-in system for navigation that we don’t use: barcodes.

Darth Maul has probably made you a coffee—at least if you’ve been to Mexico City. This is one conclusion you can draw from photographer Marcel Rius’s Fanatic Wars. He’s spent years documenting Star Wars cosplayers and collectors in Mexico, visiting their homes and putting together a visual answer to the question: how do you live with Star Wars?

What if, instead of marketing to a general demographic, you marketed to a specific individual? What if, instead of waiting for a patron to commission new work, an artist simply designed it based on someone’s psychological profile? If an online ad asked for you by name, could you resist?