The purpose of this research is to develop a method to improve the empathy of the observer by virtual experience of becoming a plant. This method develops a system that feeds back the stimuli felt by the plant to the observer as vision, auditory, and tactile information. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of this method. In the first experiment, we compared the results with and without experiencing plant vision. As a result, observers reported a closer psychological distance to the plant in the condition where they experienced the plant's vision. In the second experiment, we examined the effect on empathy when the stimuli feed back to the observer were a combination of vision, auditory, and tactile stimuli. The results suggest that increasing the stimulus feedback to the observer improves the psychological distance and facilitates the generation of empathy for the plant.

View full abstract

Dealing with complaint in the customer service industry requires high-level skills, because it is necessary to consider the needs and desires of customers while solving problems. There are two ways to learn complaint handling skills except practical work: by reading manuals and by participating in professional training. Learning by manuals can provide a procedural knowledge, but it is difficult to decrease the psychological resistance to complaints handling. This paper proposes a system that allows users to acquire complaint handling skills in an environment similar to actual work by reproducing situations for handling complaint with interactive customer actors in VR space. By simulating situations for handling complaint using VR, users are trained to skills to understand the problems and needs of customers, which is difficult to acquire only manual learning. Comparison experiment between learning using only the manual and learning using the system and the manual together is conducted with 20 university students. As a result, it is showed that the training effect on customer service skills such as empathy and honorific expression, and the psychological resistance to handling complaints decreased.

View full abstract

This research designs and implements tools that support the production of shadow box art works. In this research, we focus on the shadow box art work production process. (1) The production process involves manual work, which requires a lot of labor and materials for trial and error, and (2) Especially for beginners, it is difficult to imagine the impression of the work at the design stage, so the design decision itself is difficult. Then, to solve this problem, we have developed a tool to simulate the production of the work on a computer and a technology to propose the cutout shape of the layer. As for the simulation tool, we have developed a user interface technique that features layer editing in small area units, maintenance of inclusion relationships, shadow simulation by 3DCG, and proposals for layer division so that works can be designed interactively. The proposal of the cutout shape of the layer realized a method of estimating the depth of the image from the depth information roughly specified by the user and the input image content, and dividing the image into layers based on the depth information. We implemented the proposed tool and tried to actually produce some images. As a result, we were able to efficiently design the work in a way that was in line with the creator’s intentions.

View full abstract

In the production of stereoscopic kaleidoscopes, it is difficult to imagine the patterns in three-dimensional space displayed by repeated specular reflection. In this paper, we propose a system to support the design of patterns for a Stereoscopic Kaleidoscopes consisting of regular polyhedra. The user can design original pattern by simulating the pattern in the system.

View full abstract

Petaloid smocking is made of cloth by sewing and flattening pleats to create shapes over the surface. We have proposed a design framework for combinatorial petaloid smocking by preserving labels of folding lines in crease patterns. However, besides rather limited size of clothes, it was difficult to design flat foldable crease patterns for large size of clothes. This paper defines the module for twist folding and proposes to design the crease pattern of petaloid smocking by joining modules. We show geometric characteristics of the crease pattern based on modules and suggest a design framework based on tiling of modules. By designing a crease pattern with GeoGebra, the proposed approach is validated through making clothes with petaloid smocking.

View full abstract

In most cases, earthenware is broken when it is excavated from ruins, earthenware is restored manually. However, the restoration requires technical knowledge and experience. In addition, restoration work of a relic is a risk for damaging earthenware pieces. Therefore, as a research to support the restoration of earthenware using a computer, a study to restore the earthenware using the adjacent information of the earthenware pieces is presented. However, in previous method the initial placement of the earthenware pieces is done manually and the burden on the user is heavy. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the vertical direction and height position based on the 3D measurement point cloud of the earthenware piece. After cutting the 3D point cloud on multiple planes, each cross section is approximated by a circle, and the vertical direction and height position of the earthenware piece are estimated based on the center points and radius of the circles. This method was applied to two earthenwares, and it was possible to estimate accurately with a large piece of earthenware.

View full abstract

Wettability is a phenomenon where the contact angle of liquid against solid surface is kept, and representing wettability is one of the most important issues in physical simulations. All previous works using particle methods specified the contact angle and rectified the behavior of particles constructing the droplet. However, wettability occurs not by the specification of the contact angle but by the interaction between solid and liquid based on the physical properties. Therefore, the authors propose a new method to represent wettability not by specifying the contact angle but by considering adhesional and spreading wettings. The proposed method uses the average pressure in the fluid-structure interaction analysis for stable analysis even in the cases where the number of particles in the droplet is small or the contact surface region between the droplet and the structure is small. As the result of the simulations, the contact angle reproduced by the proposed method was more accurate than that by the previous method without specifying the contact angle. In addition, the phenomenon of a droplet sliding down on a leaf surface maintaining the high contact angle has also been represented by the fluid-structure interaction analysis.

View full abstract

Pathfinding is the calculation of a path from a point to a destination point. The main methods are Dijkstra method and A* algorithm. In these two methods, when a new target point is set outside the current shortest path, the path search needs to be performed again. The path finding method Moving Target D* Lite can find the shortest path fast under such conditions and when changes occur in the map. However, this method is no longer viable when a new starting point is set at a location that is off the current shortest path. In this study, we propose a search method that can calculate a new shortest path faster than the previous method when a new start point or a new goal point is set outside the current shortest path. In the proposed method, the search information by Dijkstra method is recorded as multiple pre-search data, and the optimal pre-search data is adopted from multiple pre-search data . For squares whose cost needs to be updated based on the pre-search data, the cost is saved as an additional movement cost and the search is performed. As a result of verifying this method, we found that it is useful when setting a new starting point at a location that is off the current shortest path for a map that has almost a single path like a mountain road or regular obstacles like a building district.

View full abstract