On December 31, Hanyang University Play Lab (Supervising Professor Kim Ki-bum) announced that it would win the Best of Innovation Award at CES (Consumer Electronics Show), held in Las Vegas in January next year, as a first among university research institutes.

CES's host, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) selects the CES Innovation Award after over 110 judges consisting of experts in industrial design, engineering, and media evaluate innovative technologies and products before the opening of the event each year.

The competition for the innovation awards this year was particularly fierce, as the number of innovative technologies and products exhibited saw the highest number at 3,400, a 13% increase compared to CES 2024. In addition, the product category expanded from 29 to 33, with newly added areas like beauty & personal care, fashion tech, industrial equipment & machinery, pet tech & animal welfare, and others. The CES Innovation Awards include "Best of Innovation" and "Honoree," and the Best of Innovation Award is given to products with the highest scores in each category.

The Department of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Hanyang University Graduate School exhibited the product TD2-Tinnitus Digital Treatment Device, which won the Best of Innovation Award in the Digital Health category. TD Square is a tinnitus treatment device that provides cognitive behavior therapy by combining auditory, visual, and tactile feedback systems with Virtual Reality (VR). It alleviates tinnitus symptoms by having patients directly control and eliminate tinnitus stereophonic avatars customized to patients, generated by Variational Autoencoder, a generative AI. The product provides a virtual environment with multiple senses (visual+auditory+tactile) that allow patients to recognize the location of tinnitus by bringing it out from inside the year to the outside, and by controlling the recognized tinnitus avatar on their own, they can correct flawed recognition and alleviate tinnitus.

TD Squared was supported by the Government's Korea Medical Device Development Project which supports the entire cycle of R&D, clinical trial, license & approval, and commercialization, as a part of a pan-governmental (the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety) initiative, and the research was conducted by a research team led by Professor Choi Joon of the Korea University Otolaryngology Department, HVR (CEO Jang Dae-seong), and a research team led by Professor Kim Sung-kean of Hanayng University. The research was published in an international academic journal Scientific Reports and is going through revision for publication in PLOS One.

Regarding a question about how he feels about the award, Professor Kim Ki-bum revealed, "TD Square is a five-year-long project started with a pilot version in 2020 and an accomplishment that was made possible thanks to the collaboration and dedication of graduate students at Hanyang University Play Lab," adding, "I want to share the award with students at lab."

Hanyang University Play Lab is conducting research on virtual reality walking assistive systems and e-sports game content for the visually impaired so that visually impaired individuals can benefit from the advancement of virtual and augmented reality. They plan to continue developing functional virtual reality content like TD Square in the future.