One reason for the recent prevalence of digital archiving at world-famous museums is its effectiveness in immersing the audience deeper into the exhibition compared to conventional printed media or video. Important cultural assets in danger of weathering and immaterial cultural assets such as ceremonies and festivals can be stored digitally using VR technology with additional interaction to stimulate not only visual but diverse human sensations. This study brings Pien Chung (Chinese bells owned by National Palace Museum) back to life with high presence and realism using SPIDAR GUI system developed at Tokyo Institute of Technology and automatic bell sound playback system. The ultimate objective is to research a new form of art merging conventional digital archives with interactive art.

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The aging process of material is an unavoidable natural phenomenon. Thus, several CG techniques for representing aging phenomena, such as metal corrosion and stone weathering, have been studied. In this paper, we propose a visual simulation method of wood weathering. First, we present the wood model in consideration of branching. Then, we give the algorithm for representing the weathering of the color and shape of wood. Several simulation examples show the availability of the proposed method. Finally, we conclude this paper and mention the future work.

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When it shoots contemporary art works by stereoscopic images, depending on the style or the tendency of works, it may fully be unable to correspond by the conventional method for making contents. For example, there are some which are called ”site specific art”, ”earth work”, etc. as a tendency of contemporary art. These are styles which attach importance to landscape. Although most stereoscopic images contents are used by pan-focus, is this method effective also such works? Or is it appropriate to shoot the balance of the work (the foreground) and the landscape (the middle distance, the background) with what focus and depth of field? When the author conducted the evaluation experiment, it was suggested that the method of pan-focus was not necessarily appropriate.

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We have developed an interactive installation called ”Penguin Hockey”. It is a demonstration content of ”Tangible Playroom” for children. Tangible playroom looks an empty children′s room but it has large tangible image space with projector and big spatial force feedback display. Children can interact with not only computer-generated objects but also their friends and real physical objects. Penguin Hockey is a simple 3D hockey game playing with A.I. penguins. Players can interact with computer-generated objects and their friend. It is targeted to players as young children, elementary school age (6-12). This system provides not only application of Mixed Reality, but also a tangible life space installation naturally.

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In Japan, there are currently more than 600 academic societies and most of these societies do not have their respective websites developed by professional web-masters. In many instances, there is a lack of clearly understandable information architecture and methods of website design are generally weak. In recent years, a number of useful web-developing software applications have been simplified and many complicated tasks cannot be completed without the expertise of system engineers. The authors attempted to conduct a research on many academic societies relative to how these societies deal with information architecture and related design methods. We have developed a model website and have proposed an ideal website prototype so that members of other academic societies may explore the model in the developments of their own websites in accordance with their own needs.

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For security requirements, a number of studies has been reported on personal identification using facial images. Most of them use facial images taken from one&primes front or side(s). The angel of the face to a camera influences the accuracy of processed results. Therefore, it is important to detect the front view of facial images correctly. In this paper, we define feature quantities and show their effectiveness in detecting specifically the front view of facial images in the horizontal and vertical directions. Our analytical results demonstrate that we can make good use of the feature quantities for the accurate and automatic detection of the frontal face direction.

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In this paper, we propose a framework of “fractal deformation” using displacement vectors based on “extended Iterated Shuffle Transformation (ext-IST)”. An ext-unit-IST is a one-to-one and onto mapping that is extended from a unit-IST, which we have proposed, and is basically defined on a code space. When the mapping is applied on a geometric space, a fractal-like repeated structure, which is referred to as “local resemblance in space/scale directions”, is constructed on the relationship between points on the domain and those on the range. By applying the mapping to displacement vectors given on a geometric shape, the shape can be deformed in the fractal-like repeated manner. This fractal deformation is easy to control by changing the displacement vectors intuitively. In addition, a continuous transition between a continuous deformation and a fractal deformation can be realized. We demonstrate how the fractal deformation technique produces attractive results by showing various examples.

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In this paper, we propose a new technique for automatically generating pencil drawing from 2D images using line integral convolution. Our idea is inspired by the similarity between the stroke textures of pencil drawings and the flow textures generated with line integral convolution. We succeeded in creating pencil drawings with their tone matching that of the original images simply by taking the vector field defining stroke directions and the white noise images generated by referring to the intensity of the original images as the input to the line integral convolution algorithm. By employing the texture analysis techniques, we also succeeded in automatically orienting strokes in the directions that convey the textures of objects appropriately.

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