Proposed by Editor-in-Chief Hayashi of Daily Portal Z: "Deliberately avoid being proper; embrace the emotional."

Suzuki: We'll also explain why this spot is good. For example, we might mention that a nice breeze blows here, making drinks taste better, or that it's great for reading. We'll give advice on how to enjoy the time there.

Hayashi: So they'll give advice considering the environment at that time, huh.

Suzuki: And once people leave, the spies start their gossip session.

Hayashi: Huh? Not like, "Oh, that person was like that"?

Suzuki: No, no, it doesn't go like that (laughs).

Hayashi: That would be pretty creepy.

I like taking notes.

Hayashi: I had the materials beforehand, so I came prepared with a proposal. Today was the first time I saw the app actually running.

Suzuki: Thank you!

Hayashi: I like taking logs. Regular activity trackers only measure heart rate, but the watch I'm wearing now can track skin temperature and perspiration. It's technically a smartwatch, so it syncs notifications too, but it doesn't support Japanese, so everything shows up as gibberish (laughs).

Abe: That's pretty useless (laughs).

Hayashi: The blue device on my bag measures temperature and air pressure. I'm not wearing it now, but it also has a camera that takes photos every 30 seconds. For some reason, I love measuring things and kept buying measuring devices. Gradually, my interest shifted to myself. Lately, I find measuring myself fun.

Suzuki: So you're essentially your own test subject.

Hayashi: This is a graph of my skin temperature and sweat volume from last Sunday.

Suzuki & Abe: Hahahahaha!

Hayashi: There was a drinking party the other day, and we were supposed to play a surprise video message. But I forgot to download the video message. When I thought, "Oh crap," my sweat output shot up.

Abe: It shot way up (laughs).

Hayashi: Lately, I've been making graphs every day and enjoying checking today's peak.

Suzuki & Abe:...

Hayashi: What I'm trying to say is, I totally get what "Spy on Me" is about.

Suzuki: Thank you (laughs).

Hayashi: Being able to detect things like pulse with a CCD camera is awesome!

How do you get people from online to real-world services?

Hayashi: This service is a real-world service, right? For services like this, you have to promote them online and get people to actually come to the location, so that hurdle is pretty high. So, I thought about what to do, and I figured there are three approaches.

Hayashi: You probably already guessed the third one would be the weakest, but the first is "show people having fun." It's a tactic Daily Portal often uses too – instead of explaining, show people enjoying themselves. This is a photo from when we did a "Victory Pose Workshop."

Abe: What kind of workshop is that? (laughs)

Hayashi: Things like victory poses or high-fives—they're surprisingly hard to do when you actually try.

Abe: You don't get many chances to do them, do you?

Hayashi: For high-fives, if I may demonstrate, you kind of let your hand escape upward like this.

Abe: Oh!

Hayashi: Then for non-visual content, you have to go all out. Like food festivals, ball pits, powder runs.

Suzuki: Ah, the powder-throwing marathon.

Hayashi: When you make it non-visual content like this, people actually show up. You can't experience it online.

Abe: By the way, are money baths popular overseas? I mean, they have an image in Japan.

Hayashi: Actually, I think movies from overseas are the original source. We filmed this in America, and it was surprisingly well-received (laughs).

Hayashi: This right here is the "Praise Mansion"—we tried making a mansion where you get praised instead of haunted, about five years ago. Inside, there's a lucky ball smashing, ribbon cutting, unveiling ceremony, and sake barrel breaking. It's the opposite of a haunted house, and that's how you actually get people to come.

Deliberately not properly announcing it

Hayashi: And today, what I mainly want to expand on is the point that it might be better to deliberately not properly announce it.

Abe: What do you mean (laugh)?

Hayashi: For example, the official landing page opens, then the people involved start arguing on Twitter. Not only that, but they respond to each other's mentions, making their arguments public for everyone to see. The internet gets chaotic, the site disappears, and finally, a half-assed site appears. That kind of flow makes it incredibly intriguing.

Suzuki: Yeah, yeah.

Hayashi: Recent online buzz is full of this kind of thing, right?

Abe: Yeah, a lot. And they get summarized in online news sites right away.

Hayashi: Exactly. Somehow, even sloppy announcements like this get through surprisingly well—they actually make people curious. The only problem is if it's staged; when it gets exposed, it becomes deeply unpopular. So I took that concept and ran with it.

Hayashi: First, there's a spy list. Then there's an exchange like, "Wait, didn't that spy quit?" followed by "We'll handle it!" and then it disappears. Then, after it disappears, you go to the site and that spy shows up.

Abe: They were removed from the site, but they still show up on location.

Hayashi: Exactly. Like that time Daily Portal accidentally published a draft article, and it had "I'll write something here" in the unfinished part. That got crazy retweets. And I was like, "Oh, so this is okay?" (laughs).

Abe: That happens, huh? (laughs)

Hayashi: People want to see the panic, right? That raw feeling. Something that makes the viewers feel panicked too.

Abe: It's real, isn't it?

Hayashi: I wonder if I might be overdoing it next time. A while back, there was that thing where clicking an ad took you to a test site, right?

Suzuki: Yeah, that happened~.

Hayashi: Seeing that made me think adding authentication might be good. There's a page with authentication somewhere, and you think, "Oh, I messed up!" But then there's a hint in small print, like "Meet at Heart Lake 120 at 4 PM," directing you to a specific spot. And the password is written at that location. Probably only one person actually goes, but if someone shares the results, it makes you curious, right?

Abe: Yeah. That's a thing.

Recommendations from the Ultimate Spy

Hayashi: Next is the final slide. Considering factors like temperature and humidity, a dry, comfortable place might not vary much between people. So, a spy who really loves extremely humid places could be interesting.

Hayashi: Someone covered in sweat shows up.

Suzuki: In past experiments, we've had those two drinking beer outdoors in the cold winter. When we surveyed them later, they turned out to be a newly dating couple who preferred chatting here over the crowds. There are a few of these extreme people here and there. If you gather enough of them, it could become commercially viable. To collect these extremes, the spy could become the representative of the extremes.

Hayashi: I went to the US and Canada recently, and everyone was dressed lightly. They said Canadians don't use umbrellas, so I tried walking without one too, but it was freezing. Plus, people were sitting at open-air cafes drinking coffee while getting rained on.

Suzuki: You see that in France too.

Hayashi: They must have tough constitutions.

Abe: Yeah, definitely tough.

Suzuki: Maybe it's about subcutaneous fat. If there was a spy who was "confident in their subcutaneous fat," I'd probably choose that spy too. From that perspective, I don't think there's navigation that distributes things like coupons based on that.

Hayashi: Like having a weak stomach. People with weak stomachs get really hyped up online, right?

Suzuki: If a spy's profile mentioned having a weak stomach or migraines, I'd definitely be interested (laughs).

Hayashi: If I empathized with a spy with a weak stomach, I'd only recommend soft udon noodles (laughs).

Suzuki: It's clearer than having a universal star player become a spy. Either way, characterizing spies like this is an interesting idea.

Hayashi: Um, is the spy a real person?

Suzuki: They're real people. The 2D "Suomi-san" is our original character, though.

Hayashi: What kind of people are they?

Suzuki: College students with an absurd number of friends.

Hayashi: I see (laugh)!

Suzuki: Yes, that's the criteria we used. They had to have a lot of friends. I don't think someone who's the ultimate handsome guy or the ultimate beauty would work. That would just make them too nervous. Instead, they needed to be genuinely approachable people.

Bringing emotion into computers

Hayashi: "Emotional" seems like the key word.

Suzuki: Exactly. If we just had a spy come from the computational environment, I think people would be put off.

Hayashi: Yeah, it would just feel creepy.

Suzuki: Exactly. There's definitely a creepy aspect to it.

Hayashi: Last year at Design Week, there was an android girl who kept saying, "I'm not scary, I'm not scary." Because everyone's first reaction is "creepy," right? There's a huge barrier like that when you try to do something with computers.

Suzuki: Exactly. It's not just about simple functionality or convenience. That sense of connection—I think systems in our cities will need that going forward.

Hayashi: You often see online, "These jobs will be replaced by AI!" But I think that's just a roundabout way of expressing fear of technology.

Suzuki: When introducing AI, being too genius probably isn't good either.

Hayashi: I think there's definitely that aspect.

Suzuki: You really have to tailor it to the person's level.

Hayashi: I think there should be room for human touch in notifications too.

Suzuki: That's exactly what you'd call an emotional announcement (laughs).