NEW ORLEANS - If you pull on my ear, will I follow you anywhere?

Yes, say researchers at University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. And along complex paths. Even when directed from a distance. Their ear-tugging navigator looks like a bug-shaped hat and may be the oddest gizmo among nearly three dozen in the "Emerging Technologies" area of SIGGRAPH '09, the 36th international conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques that starts Monday.

The conference, which runs through Friday, also includes an animation festival, game design and animation workshops and contests, a studio, an art show, and other showcases and exhibits.

The 33 "Emerging Technologies" exhibits include a click-and-drag graphical editor to tell robots how to perform complex tasks such as folding clothes; an umbrella that moves as if you were fending off a downpour of rain, spaghetti or toy snakes; and a virtual reality floor that designers say can feel like walking on snow.

The ear navigator, called Pull-Navi, has six helmet-mounted motors to pull the wearer's ears forward, backward, left, right, up and down. The designers say people follow its lead almost instinctively - pull left and they turn that way; pulling both ears forward or backward at the same time makes them speed up or slow down; and tugging up or down heads them up or down stairs.

It goes into the who'da-thunk-it category of exhibits.

"Every year there's just some submissions that are just so completely wacky it's not really on anyone's radar," said Mk (pronounced M-K) Haley, one of the jurors for Emerging Technologies since 1998. "They get everybody thinking and discussing."

This one, she said, got her thinking, "Wow. Human beings can really be physically manipulated so easily. And what other applications may there be for that?"

Past exhibits heralding applications now commonplace have included Electric Postcards in 1995 and, in 1991, Michigan State University's informational kiosk, called Click On MSU.

MIT Media Lab researcher Judith S. Donath, who studies online social interaction, was startled by the popularity of the Internet postcard site that she created to learn a computer language and showed off at SIGGRAPH '95.

"People didn't realize the social possibilities of the Internet. You could put news there, buy things, maybe. But it wasn't particularly social," she said.

She thought a few of her friends might send each other cards from the site, which opened in December 1994. But it went viral - a phrase not then coined. "We eventually had millions and millions of cards sent through it," she said.

American Greetings Corp. began offering e-cards in 1996 and Hallmark Cards Inc.