In this paper, we propose "Paper Windows", a paper interface that can use on the capacitive touch-panel display. Operating through a window on the card allows the user to use it as an independent touch-panel display. Using a paper card can give a user feeling like "using a small touch-panel display". And we also propose a creating method for interface using inkjet printer with conductive ink. This allows a user to create an interface easily and at a low cost. Furthermore, we experimented on the recognition accuracy of the interface that are painted conductive points.

"MIOSS" is a mirror interface that can overlay remote spaces, enabling user to feel as if they are in same room and thereby perform smooth remote cooperative work with shared objects. MIOSS imparts motion parallax through a mirror that adjusts to the viewpoint of the user, in addition to providing geometrical consistency in shielding, size, and positional relationships in the two remote spaces. Experimental evaluations of an implemented MIOSS system show that users can recognize the exact positions of shared objects in the partner's space via the mirror video with geometrical consistency and motion parallax. They also indicate that MIOSS supports boosting the performance of remote cooperative work for the creation of layouts with shared objects. Users can accurately perceive the exact layout of shared objects via the mirror video and feel that they actually share the room.

An embodied video communication system, called 'E-VChat', was developed for enhancing remote communication using a video image. This system is constructed by the partner's video image using interactive CG characters including user's own avatar and virtual audience characters. We have confirmed the effectiveness of the system by an experiment under free conversation. In this study, we focus on consensus building communication using a video communication system with user's own avatars and virtual audiences. For consensus building from different opinions of speakers, we can expect the system to provide confidence to speakers about their own opinions using the interactive CG audiences, because speakers can experience the agreeable responses from virtual audiences. We have developed embodied communication systems including two users' avatars and speech-driven embodied entrainment objects using plant or shadow-figure models, and the effectiveness of this communication system which presented entrainment reaction was confirmed in the experiment under consensus building. Accordingly, we develop an embodied entrainment audience characters system with partner's face to relate audience characters with the partner. This system could bring about more active interaction by virtual audience even if the remote partner does not respond to user's speech. And we thus conduct two communication experiments using this system to confirm the effectiveness of the system for 12 pairs of 24 talkers.

Tabletop displays serve as shared displays and co-located workspaces for multiple people. People often place physical objects such as mockup models on the table as an intuitive communication tool for tabletop displays. However, current tabletop displays have limitations in terms of image presentation: The display area is limited to horizontal surfaces, and the view-dependent appearance of the shared images is not provided. The goal of this paper is to solve these limitations by combining dual-sided vertical mid-air images and horizontal image projection to enhance visual presentation. For this purpose, our optical design employed a plate-shaped imaging optics as a tabletop surface and diffusion control film as a projection screen. The proposed system, "HoVerTable," provides both vertical and horizontal images to two users facing one another. In this paper, we describe the details of our optical design. A user study confirmed that providing text captions dependent on users' viewpoints is effective for text annotation in a shared tabletop environment. With HoVerTable, users can enjoy interactive applications such as a mixed reality showcase.

A challenge to Augmented Reality (AR) is to provide proper depth perception when an inner virtual object image is overlaid on a real object. To improve depth perception in stereoscopic AR, we focus on the "stereoscopic pseudo-transparency" effect induced by a method that overlays a random dot mask on the real object surface. This method conveys to the observers the illusion of observing the virtual object through many small holes and makes We expect that our proposed method improves not only the perception of the spatial relationship between a real object surface and an inner object, but it also improves the depth perception (i.e., observers can distinguish the distance between them). Through the series of experiments, we investigated that (1) the occlusion and density of the mask affects depth and transparency perception, respectively, (2) the proposed method is effective for improving the depth perception between the real object surface and the virtual object compared to existing methods, and (3) the proposed method can be used with motion cues.

Detection and isolation of human emotion from brain activities has been attracted in various research fields such as neuromarketing. A relation between a level of brain activity and pleasant and unpleasant emotions has been studied using Nearinfrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). This non-invasive technique uses near-infrared light to evaluate increases or decreases in oxygenated hemoglobin or deoxygenated hemoglobin in tissues below the body surface. However, it is difficult to find out the difference between the pleasant and unpleasant emotion on the brain activity because the different stimuli were used in the experiments in previous studies. In this study, the relation between the brain activity and the pleasant and unpleasant emotions was evaluated using International Affective Picture System (IAPS) and NIRS. Based on the NIRS recording for 21 participants, the effect of pleasant and unpleasant emotion on the brain activity is studied first. Then, detection of pleasant and unpleasant emotion from NIRS signal was conducted using Neural Network. Results showed that a significant difference in the brain activity can be appeared in the central part of the frontal lobe. It is also shown that the pleasant and unpleasant emotion can be detected with the accuracy of 96% (the highest) and 70% (average).

Although the number of applications of product recommendation virtual agents (PRVAs) for online shopping is rapidly increasing, few studies on effective PRVAs have been done. Hence, we investigated which types of PRVAs are effective through experiments with participants. First, we focused on variation in the appearance of PRVAs and prepared six PRVAs having various appearances from human-like to text. Then, we prepared six products that customers might want in any situation, and conduct withinparticipant experiments in which the participants reported their impressions on the agents and evaluated their buyer motivation for all combinations of the PRVAs and the products. By seeing the averages and performing statistic tests on the results, we found that the human-like PRVA was the most effective among the various PRVAs including video of a real human, and a robot-like PRVA. Furthermore, by performing a factor analysis on the experimental results, we also found the two important factors of the PRVAs, familiarity and intelligence, to influence the recommendation effects.