We developed an ICT based nature soaking system as one of sensate communication environments and evaluated its effectiveness on relaxation, refreshment, and cognitive recovery in terms of following three aspects: ambient sensation vs. watching a nature video, having past experience or not, and stimuli quasi-liveness vs. archives. Measurements employed in two experiments were questionnaires about subjective comfort, physiological stress indexes (LF/HF), and cognitive achievement (creativity or association test). The results showed that ambient sensation had influences on all the three measurements. The effects appeared in several minutes soaking. Having past experience and quasi-liveness were effective only on subjective comfort. This study implies that sensate communication is promising for psychological and physiological relaxation and recovery.

The study investigates the potential application of remotely controllable microphone and capacitance sensor for wildlife monitoring in ecological study. By using a remotely controllable microphone, observers are able to listen to the presence of unspecified target animals in a distant forest in real time. Furthermore, the capacitance sensor in musical instrument is able to detect the approaching animals around the microphone at the same time. This paper describes basic explanation and evaluation of the each methodology with discussing the pros and cons of traditional observation methods, widely used in ecological study.

Currently, Internet provides much information about daily life, such as weather forcast, traffic information, etc. Therefore, it is important to present these information by suitable interface. We developed "Fabcell Partition" as an ambient interface with a textile module called "Fabcell", which fabric is dyed with liquid crystal ink and film heater, controlled by controle module via wireless network. We evaluated this "Fabcell Partition" from three perspectives a performance test for displaying specific colors, users' cognition on color separation and users' impressions compared with LCD Display. The results show the possibility of "Fabcell Partition" as an ambient display to provide various information.

An ambient environment encompasses a wide variety of devices, various technologies and context of use to provide the users an environment that makes them feel comfortable and best suits to their needs. Although the Web-enabled mobile devices used in such an environment might vary in their capabilities, they would always be a good candidate for interaction with different applications in an ambient environment. We describe our framework for designing web applications based on context-of-device used where both the device capabilities and environmental changes are taken into consideration to design the user interface for specific devices. Our framework enables the web interface to be tailored on the devices based on their supporting capabilities and hence giving different presentation views to interact with the same application.

We propose a HMD (head mounted display) -based wearable AR (augmented reality) system that switches details of annotation information according to user's body motion such as walking and running, as a first step toward a more powerful and flexible context-aware AR system. Our body motion recognition algorithm uses a pair of accelerometers attached on user's thighs and recognizes five types of body motion -sitting, standing, walking, running and biking- as a user context by using a support vector machine. Through experimental studies with a prototype system, it was confirmed that the main concept of body motion-based information detail switching is widely accepted and that the recognition algorithm mostly functions as expected, though a few issues were identified that need to be improved such as a low running state recognition rate.

As we know dining table is a central hub in home environment to share information, activities, and decision making with family members and visitors. Since, it's important to control the environment of dining table based on member's preferences and intentions to a create fascinate surrounding. As a next-generation dining table, we are investigating a "Sociable Dining Table " with "KonKon" interface (knock sound) for interacting between user and sociable creatures (pot and dish). We have focus on knock sound "KonKon" as minimal cues for proto-communication to establish mutual adaption between creatures and user. In this paper, we discuss the concept and system configuration for the Sociable Dining Table, and Actor-Critic architecture based mutual adaptation. In the experiment, we evaluate the performance of sociable creatures with an Actor-Critic adaptation model while user interacting with the Sociable Dining Table.

As a countermeasure against global warming to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from vehicles, "eco-driving" have attracted a great deal of attention. Fuel economy would be improved by the eco-driving, which includes the following driving behaviors; driving with a few changes in velocity, smooth acceleration at start, active use of engine brakes, and so on. However, the fuel consumption reduction effects of the eco-driving have still not been verified adequately. Furthermore, there are few studies which verify effects of instruction contents of the eco-driving and a fuel consumption meter on the driving behaviors. In the present paper, driving simulator experiments are performed to evaluate the fuel consumption reduction effects of the instruction of the eco-driving and the presentation of the fuel consumption meter.

Our aim is to provide visually impaired persons with information-barrier-free interfaces as a countermeasure to the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of digital broadcasts, the Web, etc. It isn't enough to access and comprehend visual representations of information such as GUI control screens and figures and tables by means of only information presented in a time series like audio descriptions, Braille. We here report on a tactile interface (called Tactile NAVI) that can recognize by touch the hierarchical structure and objects of content and the configuration of tables in a screen while also performing interactive operations. First, we describe a search experiment on GUI and table data to compare differences in search time between tactile navigation using Tactile NAVI and audio navigation based on key operations. It was found that tactile navigation could significantly reduce search time. Next experiment, we describe an accessibility-evaluation experiment using the content of an actual data broadcast and an electronic programming guide (EPG). It is shown that the learning effect on search time is large in the case of tactile navigation. It was also suggested by subjective evaluations in both experiments that tactile navigation and associated tactile presentations were effective in comprehending hierarchical tree structures, table configurations, and their positional relationships.