In the human interface study, interaction does not only function as a subject of studies to explore human-system relationships or human-human relationships, but also be generally treated as a methodology to manage such relations appropriately and achieve purposed mission. Therefore, it is required that the interaction is designed simple as possible. This idea associates with the concept of the minimum design. The minimum design of interaction considers the entropy of the interaction activities that naturally increases with progress of the interaction. In this paper, we propose three aspects to discuss the minimum design of interaction (MDI): physical, cognitive, and social. These aspects are closely related to human activities interacting with systems or others. The MDI approach contributes to achieve constructing essential and fundamental interaction between human and system or between human and human.

Good control of drumsticks is very important for achieving fast drumming and clear sound. It is well known that intentional use of the extensor muscle of the wrists is required to eliminate unnecessary strain. However, mastering this technique is generally difficult. No efficient and practical method, tool or system has been developed for training the extensor muscle for typical drumming performances. In this paper, we propose a novel system to support users by giving them a way to efficiently practice the intentional use of the extensor muscle in natural drumming. This system exploits the effect of insignificantly delayed auditory feedback: Drummers come to raise the sticks higher than usual when an approximately 20-msec delay is given between impact and sound, although they cannot perceive the delay. We conducted user studies and confirmed that the users could efficiently train the extensor muscle using the proposed system but felt no difference in performance from using a conventional drum.

To enable users to operate PCs naturally as if they communicated with human, we propose a novel hand gesture user interface (UI) that introduces natural sweeping hand motions for up/down/left/right commands. The natural sweeping hand motions differ among users in length and velocity, and consist not only of intentional movements in the direction desired but also unintentional movements in the direction not desired. To find similarities among users' natural sweeping hand motions, we analyzed them in a preliminary experiment and found that the velocity of an intentional movement is higher than that of an unintentional movement. Based on this knowledge, we developed a hand gesture UI that recognizes a movement whose velocity is higher than those of the movements occurring just before and just after it as an intentional movement, and introduces the direction of the intentional movement for commands. We had 20 novice users complete tasks by hand gestures without demonstrating a good example. Results of this experiment showed that our UI can recognize users' desired operations with the natural sweeping hand motions.

In this paper, we propose to make intention drawing from system to human and collecting task between human and empty-box just by behaviors with two axis actuators. First, we extracted elements of minimum interaction model between user and empty-box using immersion discovering method based on Wizard of Oz method. Next, we designed three-state model based on findings. Third, we implemented three-state model by motion capture system, and confirms how collecting task was achieved. Last, we evaluated these models are indistinguishable from human manipulation using Turing-test based evaluation.

A small (cellphone size) human-like robotic avatar in tele-communications will be a novel portable communication medium in that a user can talk with another person while feeling the other's presence at anytime, anywhere. The human-like robotic avatar is expected to express human-like movements; however, there are technical and cost problems to implement actuators in the small body. This paper proposes an idea to illusorily move the avatar's extremities with blinking lights. This idea needs only LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) and avoids the above problems. This paper designs a LED blinking pattern to invoke a nodding motion of a hand-held tele-operated humanoid robot. A psychological experiment shows that the designed blinking pattern gives better impression to subjects than an symbolic blinking pattern. This result suggests that even the illusory motion of robotic avatar can improve tele-communications and it is suitable for human-like robotic avatars with respect to a minimally human-like motion expression.

In order to maintain higher level of aviation safety in the rapid growth of air traffic demands, it is required to realize Situation Awareness (SA) support systems for Air Traffic Control Officers (ATCOs). However, since human-machine interfaces of complex systems such as Air Traffic Control (ATC), aircraft, nuclear power plant, have already provided much information, additional supporting information may lead to unacceptable increase of operator's cognitive burden contrary to its original supporting purpose. Therefore, the present research aims at developing a basic supporting method of SA in a complex system without making excessive cognitive burden. A prototype SA support system called Graded Conflict Information Alert System (GRACIAS) has been proposed and installed into an experimental multi-task simulator simulating simplified ATC tasks. In an evaluation experiment with 10 participants, participants' detection rate of situation change in the earlier time frame has been improved by using GRACIAS without decreasing performance of other routine tasks. This result has implied that proposed supporting method can be effective for supporting situation awareness in complex multi-task condition.

Organization of items has strong impact on the usability of hierarchical menu systems. Menus should be designed so that their structures are consistent with user expectations in order to avoid breakdowns in human-system interaction towards any particular functions. Regarding this issue, we focus on dependency structure which captures syntactic connections among elements involved in individual function performances. A set of "interaction primitives" is introduced and extended as the description scheme to analyze the dependency structure within each function, resulting in a small set of patterns named "common structures". A new method is proposed utilizing these structural patterns to generate a menu hierarchy so that the user can easily derive solutions to identify the locations of untried or unfamiliar functions from past experience of searching similar functions in it. An experiment was conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper proposes a method of extracting efficient features for recognizing Japanese sign language words and recognizing them with Hidden Markov Model. Hand and face regions are extracted and tracked by image processing technique. Features of hand motion and shape are calculated by the extracted regions. Each HMM model is trained by Baum-Welch algorithm. The number of states is determined based on segmentation of the hand motion. Viterbi algorithm is employed for recognition. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed method.

Bibliobattle, which is a framework that supports information sharing by introducing books together among participants, has been spread all over Japan. We consider that the Bibliobattle possesses a filtering method that selects a recommendation book from enormous books by presenters. In this paper, we verify what kind of recommendation methods the Bibliobattle possesses when we regard it as a kind of recommender systems. Compared with baseline systems, including a keyword search system, a recommender system by content-based filtering, and that by collaborative filtering, the recommender system by the Bibliobattle is superior to them from the viewpoint of diversity, novelty, and overall satisfaction. In addition, this paper showed that is was superior to them from the viewpoint of explanation because of its characteristics of that the presenters introduce their favorite books together.

By advancement of communication technologies, it became possible to communicate with anyone in distant places using audio and visual connections. However, such remote communication still has noticeable difference from the face-to-face communication, partly because the lack of information of other sensations. Our research focused on the transmission of breathing in the remote communication. An experimental system that measures the breathing by an anemometer and presents wind by air nozzle was implemented. Through experiments using subjects, it was proved that the transmission of breathing is helpful for conveying the intensity of emotion.