In this paper, we proposed the concept to alleviate fear or anxiety by reproducing the sensation of being with someone and developed Breath Chair. We evaluated our system. Score of STAI was lower and fingertip temperature were higher with simulated breathing than without, revealing a significant difference. These evaluation results suggested that subjects’ fear or anxiety decreased as a result of simulating breathing.

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This paper presents a crowd-powered efficient impression evaluation system, and a visualization system for ranked impression evaluation results. The former system shows a lot of content images to participants and consumes their inputs as impression evaluations. Here, this system preferentially selects images which are estimated as to be highly or poorly evaluated, by applying interactive genetic algorithm. The latter system visualizes the content images as ranked based on the impression evaluation results, so that users can easily find a set of highly or poorly evaluated images. This paper presents a method for estimation of evaluations of images which are shown to no one by the former system. This paper also presents a method to calculate the scores of images while normalizing the evaluation results. Finally, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of the presented systems with our case study on appearances of women.

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Recently, people have come to communicate in various styles with diversification of information. Especially visual communication using emoticons such as emojis and stickers are often used in an e-mail or messages on SNSs. This paper focuses on stickers of LINE, which is the most popular SNS in Japan, and analyzes the relationship between abstract impressions and characteristics of designs. We collect 100 LINE stickers, define 60 design elements that compose of the stickers, then apply two analytical methods -- principal component analysis (PCA) and a rough set as a technique of data mining. PCA can find the main design elements of stickers, and the rough set can classify designs giving a specific abstract impression. By clarifying these relationships, it becomes easier to design various stickers, which leads to an acceleration of visual communication.

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[in Japanese]

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Plants are very familiar in our daily life; therefore many interactive system using plants have been developed in these years. In these systems, movements of a plant are provided by actuators. Some system uses natural motion of plants, but these changes are too slow to perceive by people. The Shameplant (Mimosa pudica) is known to move its twigs and leaves after stimulation, and people have enjoyed its reactions over time. In this paper, we propose and implement a system that creates a rapid movement of a twig of plants using a reaction of shameplants. Also, we investigated methods and conditions that cause its twigs to face downward, by applying electrical stimulation using a computer and an Arduino. In this research, our goal is to control each twig as a granularity by reproducing the motion of shameplants when they touched by human hands. As a result, we successfully created the motion by connecting an anode to a copper plate which is inserted into the soil and a cathode to a dress pin which is penetrated to the twig. Moreover, we found the condition to make twigs to face downward by applying electrical stimulation. Also, we found that the necessary voltage to move twigs was above 5V. As another finding, we found that even if we keep applying electrical stimulation, the twigs which faced downward will begin to face upward. Based on these results, we established a method to control Shameplant’s movement at each twig using a computer.

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Zentangle is a pattern art composed of regular patterns, such as symmetric patterns and self-similarity patterns. We formalized a model of pattern generating processes and conducted computer simulation for generating zentangle patterns automatically. This paper describes three features of zentanlge covered in this research, regularity, ununiformity, and filling process, then presents a model of zentangle. This model premises that zentangle patterns are composed of three classes of patterns. Also, this model deforms the patterns and draws them on empty white regions repeatedly for simulating the features of ununiformity and filling processes. The patterns based on this model have similar features to hand drawn zentangle patterns. Our simulation tool has some functions for interactive pattern composition, as well as auto-generating functions. For example, users can select a sub-pattern to fill a certain target region to compose desired zentangle patterns, or can use gray scale images to define target regions filled with sub-patterns.

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We propose the Kage (shadow in Japanese) User Interface (KUI), which allows a user to manipulate a shadow with intuitive gestures. KUI allows a user's interaction with a shadow to move the object that is creating the shadow. This in turn changes the shadow itself. This interaction allows a user to manipulate a shadow by interacting with that same shadow. In this paper, we demonstrate an implementation of KUI that allows a user to make a shadow bigger or smaller through a pinch-in/pinch-out gesture, which moves an object vertically to adjust the shadow's shape. Another implementation stops the circular motion system of objects by touching a shadow. At the end of the paper, we present an evaluation experiment of our findings, proposing a new, intuitive interaction experience for users with our Kage User Interface.

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