From Cosplay to Daily Life: Exploring the Positive Impacts of Role Play
Yining “Elaine” Zhang’s thesis, From Cosplay to Daily Life: Exploring the Positive Impacts of Role Play, reimagines cosplay not as escapism, but as a powerful tool for self-transformation. Drawing from her own experience as a cosplayer, Elaine explores how embodying a character can unlock confidence, reshape self-perception, and help individuals explore new aspects of identity. But what happens when the costume comes off?
“Cosplay doesn’t feel connected to my real life—it pulls me out of it.
That’s why the confidence and sense of accomplishment I get from it don’t carry over into my everyday world.”
— Fei, Cosplayer & Graphic Designer
Through a suite of four interconnected projects, Elaine investigates how the emotional and behavioral benefits of role play can extend beyond conventions and into daily life. Her work creates a bridge between imaginative performance and real-world growth, offering tools—both digital and physical—for cultivating social confidence, expressive freedom, and self-awareness.
MORO Smart Mirror
MORO is a portable, AI-powered smart mirror designed to help users build social confidence by practicing everyday role play. Through facial expression and speech analysis, MORO offers real-time feedback in scenarios like interviews, presentations, and conversations.
Using posture tracking and micro-expression recognition, MORO analyzes your body language and voice to give you helpful, contextual feedback in real time. This feedback will show in an application on the phone. Lightweight and modular, the mirror is designed to feel approachable and neutral—it can be hung on a wall, placed on a desk, or moved between rooms. Rather than promoting perfection, MORO invites users to experiment, adjust, and try again.
“It’s like having a personal coach,” Elaine explains. “It helps you refine your expressions and posture in real time, while giving you space to practice being your true or aspirational self.”
Mirror Diary
Mirror Diary is a digital journaling platform that blends self-reflection with imaginative roleplay. Created for those navigating social anxiety or exploring identity, the app offers daily character-based challenges that encourage users to engage with different versions of themselves. Through goal-setting, AI-generated insights, and persona tracking, Mirror Diary transforms emotional exploration into a playful, structured experience—helping users build confidence by embodying the roles they aspire to in real life.
When a user opens the app for the first time, they complete a short personality test. Based on the results, the app recommends a few role models whose traits complement or challenge your own. Let’s say you're preparing for an interview or need to pitch a product—you might be matched with someone like Steve Jobs, known for his persuasive communication.
Once you select your role model, you can choose from a set of tasks for the day—each one designed to shape your behavior, memory, and self-expression. If you select a task you’ll be taken to a task detail page with examples, videos, and community submissions to learn from.
You can record your performance, connect to the MORO Smart Mirror via Bluetooth, and practice while receiving real-time feedback. Here’s how that looks in action:
“After your session, you can download or share your recording in the app’s community space,” Elaine explains. “Users are encouraged to reflect by writing about their tasks, thoughts, and emotions. Over time, the app tracks your progress, and offers feedback to support your personal growth.” So together, the MORO Smart Mirror and Mirror Diary work as a system to help you roleplay, reflect, and gradually transform into the version of yourself you want to be.
MORO Studio
MORO Studio is an offline mirror experience space where self-reinvention meets immersive design. More than a retail environment, the studio offers guided transformation sessions, where users collaborate with stylists, roleplay experts, and behavioral coaches to step into a new version of themselves. Ideal for those curious about self-presentation but unfamiliar with cosplay or makeup, MORO Studio bridges aesthetics and identity, offering an inclusive, supportive setting to discover—and try on—who you want to become.
Whether preparing for a high-stakes event or simply trying to feel more aligned in everyday life, MORO Studio provides tools for embodied experimentation. The service transforms role play into a collaborative, creative process—redefining self-improvement as something imaginative, playful, and deeply personal.
One user shared, “Every time I looked in the mirror, I felt like I was shedding my own identity and becoming closer to the character.” Here are just a few examples of transformation challenges that Elaine co-designed and completed with some of her users:
Looking-Glass Self
Inspired by interviews with people who experience social anxiety, Looking-Glass Self is an interactive mirror installation that invites participants to sit across from one another and respond to a series of reflective prompts. They then exchange their answers—revealing how they see each other.
Participants are paired and prompted to reflect on questions like, “What is your first impression of this person?” or “What kind of life do you think they lead?”—transforming the mirror into a social lens. By surfacing external perceptions, the experience gently challenges internal assumptions and expands our understanding of self, offering a poetic, relational exploration of identity.
Set within a two-way mirror installation, the piece encourages participants to reexamine the gap between internal self-image and external perception. For many, the experience is quietly transformative.
Together, these projects form a holistic system that brings the power of role play into everyday spaces. Elaine’s work invites us to view identity as fluid, expressive, and open to change. By designing tools that support gentle transformation, she shows how cosplay’s core values—creativity, courage, and care—can help anyone become a more confident version of themselves.
For a deeper look into Elaine’s thesis process, research, and reflections, explore the following links:
View Elaine’s comprehensive Thesis Repository on Notion
To learn more about Elaine’s work visit: www.yininggao.com
