In this paper we consider the development of a museum guide robot that has both autonomous and remotely controlled features. We focus on the capabilities such a robot could have to help focus the attention of a visitor on an object or artefact. Inspired by studies of social interaction, which investigate whether the robot could deploy "restarts" and "pauses" at certain moments in its talk to first elicit the visitor's attention/gaze towards the robot. We report an experiment where we deployed such a robot to interact with real visitors to a science museum. These experiments show that such a strategy does seem to have a significant impact on obtaining the visitor's gaze.

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The traditional folk dances should be preserved and exhibited in order to bequeath these dances to the next generations. A digital museum is a good candidate for this purpose because we can exhibit dances using a CG reproduction technique. We can preserve and reproduce dances by using motion capture system. When exhibiting the dances in a digital museum, we have to not only reproduce dances, but also add exhibition effects to the reproduced contents. It is difficult to decide exhibition effects because a high degree of CG techniques is required. Hence, we propose a system for creating the CG contents to exhibit dances in a digital museum. The proposed system can define exhibition effects by using the GUI and generates a camerawork automatically. We implement the proposed system and show how effectively it works.

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Recently, activities about the 3D digital archive of cultural heritages become very popular. The development of this technology aims at satisfying the competing ideals of preserving cultural heritage while at the same time making it available to the public. Rich expression by the stereoscopic 3D is suitable for the viewing of 3D data saved culture heritages. In this paper, we report on the work of archiving heritage of Chinese Maijishan Grotto and the developing of stereoscopic VR content for it. In our content, viewers can experience the precious cultural heritage which can't be usually watched. Representation of cultural heritage can be more lifelike by presenting stereoscopic images and interactions. In addition, the results of the subjective evaluation confirmed VR content's reality and 3D effects.

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This pager proposes a projection-based AR guide system which guides users using a mobile projector in indoor environment. The projection-based AR guide system projects guidance of exhibits onto walls or floors in the real world. In order to realize this system, it is necessary to measure a position and an orientation of the projector precisely in a wide area. In the proposed guide system, the projector's position is estimated from images capturing invisible markers which are set up on ceilings with an infrared camera attached to the projector. In addition, to indicate the guide information intuitively for users, the proposed system displays information at three dimensional position using two projectors and polarized glasses.

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In this paper we propose a tele-robotics systems that enables museum curator to present guide tour to museum visitor from outside exhibition hall. In museums, exhibition guide tour is widely conducted as a strong support for exhibition appreciation activity. Effectiveness in exhibition guide tour is based on its interactivity caused by face to face discussion between visitors and curator. However, it has strong restriction in space and time for curator, museums are not able to perform exhibition guide tour frequently. Therefore, we propose the systems that experts in exhibition theme can perform such guide tour through robot and network and provide more opportunities to present guide tours for museum visitors. The main idea of our system is that remote operator does not need to pay attention to locomotion control of robot. So that operator is able to concentrate on commentary on exhibits. In order to achieve the autonomous locomotion of robot we extended the rules of the use of space in proxemics, then proposed an algorithm to determine the appropriate position and speed of robot in during guidance of museum visitor. Evaluation report from experiment in museum site is also described.

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This paper describes a mobile science-museum-guide system using an indoor/outdoor positioning system, a pilot user study to evaluate the usability of the navigation system, and a GUI tool for reliving experiences of the participants using the activity log of the pilot user study. The prototype navigation system manages content consisting of 3-D maps, recommended routes, and Flash files to provide appropriate navigation information based on estimated user position, orientation, and their history. The pilot study was conducted at the Science Museum. We got useful feedback from participants about 3-D maps, recommended routes, etc. The reliving tool makes it possible to retrieve position histories, video, and audio data of visitors with position, orientation, time, keywords, and so on from large-scale activity log recorded by the navigation system and to present the data with synchronization. The mobile system can be applied to making analysis of visitors' behavior with realistic sensation on the spot.

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Recent advances in 3D visualization from research on computer graphics (CG) and computer vision (CV) have stimulated vigorous research on the digital modeling and rendering of woven fabrics. In this paper, we propose an efficient image-based method for modeling of weave patterns of silk-like woven fabrics of filament yarns, from multi-illuminated HDR (High Dynamic Range) image analysis, based on the mesostructure of woven fabrics, such as Noh costume. The cloth simulation results on arbitrarily chosen parameter of weave pattern model of Noh costume show the performance of the proposed approach.

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In mixed reality (MR) environment, a touchable object can be changed its appearance by superimposing a computer generated image (MR visual stimulation) onto it. In this paper, we focus on the "roughness" as one tactual impression, and study the effects of MR visual and audio stimulation on tactual impression with some systematic experiments. We has investigated that MR visual stimulation causes the different tactual impression from a real object. Meanwhile, it has been indicated that touch impression could be also affected by audio stimulation generated stroking the object. Therefore, it would appear that touch impression is more affected by MR visual and audio stimulation. As the result of experiments, MR visual and audio stimulation much more affect it than MR visual stimulation.

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This paper describes "ene-geometrix", an installation using fluid thermal convection phenomena. We produced this work to make an opportunity when people obtain the insight to the energy system symbolizing the today's paradigm shift from the mechanical view of nature to the view of nature by the theory of life. In this installation, applied the flow visualization method and the technology of the control engineering, various shapes are drawn on a liquid surface by the flow caused by the thermal actuator control and the Self-organization phenomena.

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This paper discusses an approach to implement projection transformation for projector based stereo display system. The approach does not require users to have specialized knowledge on either hardware setup and sophisticated rendering algorithms. In our approach, position and orientation of projector relative to screen are estimated based on test projection, and a projection transformation that is processable by OpenGL model-view and projection matrix scheme is generated. This approach relaxes constraints on both projector installation and rendering hardware, and enables reusing existing drawing program code.

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This paper describes a geometric registration method using visually unobtrusive flat posters arranged in the real world for mixed reality. The proposed method is one approach of SFINCS (Semi-Fiducials Invisible Coded Symbols) research whose purpose is achieving good balance between elegance with regard to the environment and robustness of the registration. In this method, posters which will be used for geometric registration are designed to blend into the environment, but recognized as markers based on certain design rules. Posters in the real scene can be found in real time using these design rules. This paper introduces the framework of this method and describes two kinds of design rules: layout rules and color scheme rules. Some experiments using example rule sets are also described to show the potential abilities of our proposed method.

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To develop an interaction system to create new motor sensation that is not limited to range of joint motion, authors focused attention on illusory kinesthesia created by tendon vibration. Therefore, authors developed an experimental system which created illusory hyperextension kinesthesia of an upper arm by vibrating the biceps brachii muscle, and by moving the upper arm toward extending direction with variable speed and from/to a target position. Experiment results indicated that an initial position of a vibrated arm, number of times to move the arm, and moving velocity of the arm had an influence on enhancing illusory hyperextension kinesthesia.

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In near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), there is optical pathlength problem. Thus, NIRS measurements cannot be compared between subjects and or regions within a subject. In this study, we propose a separation method for the optical pathlength influence by the variance plot analysis using the variance of the sample mean to NIRS time series signal. As a validation example, we conducted variance plot analysis on auditory selective attention by 10 subjects of normal adult males. As a result, in 8 subjects out of 10 subjects for auditory area on the left side and 7 subjects out of 10 subjects on the right side for auditory area, channels corresponded which are activated concentrating on listening to music.

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Several types of hand-held devices have been developed in order to enable interactive manipulations in mixed reality space. Position and posture estimations of the device are required for direct manipulation with virtual objects. Fiduciary markers or large-scale motion capture systems are usually used for these estimations because they can be identified easily. However, they encounter problems with estimation stability, and the device shows decreased portability due to system scale, determining area, and disturbances. To avoid these problems, we propose a hybrid method for tracking hand-held devices that combines vision-based registration with pose information obtained from a physical 3DOF orientation sensor. In vision-based methods, estimations are performed with device forms and LED active markers. We confirmed that the new device tracking method can provide tracking stability.

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When a user operates slave robots in the telexistence master-slave system, the fact that the dimension of the user does not match the dimension of the slave robot has an influence on the task performance. In particular, when the dimensions of the user and the slave robot are non-similar, uniform scaling cannot be used. In this study, we examined the effect of the non-similarity on the task performance. From the evaluation results, we can conclude that the effect on the working task performance is small if each dimension of parts of the slave robot is lower than 1.2 times of the dimension of the user.

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Tactile displays composed of a plenty of pins (pin matrix) are one of the most common types of developed tactile displays so far. However, only a few studies examined the appropriate diameter of pins and the interval between adjacent pins to convey comprehensible tactile information. We conducted an experiment in which participants evaluated the shape primitives either through a pin matrix tactile display or through a bare finger. The interval between adjacent pins (from 1.0 to 2.0mm)and the diameter of pins (from 0.8 to 1.8mm)were manipulated. We found that participants could correctly answered tactile shape primitives as touching with a bare finger when they touched with a pin matrix of 1.0mm spatial interval between adjacent pins. Yet, the time for answering the shape when touching with a pin matrix took about 25% longer comparing when touching with a bare finger.

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This paper presents a method which measures the transmission delay time of real-time scene from the video camera onto the distant screen. The camera takes a picture of a timer with on-off marker and sends it to the screen. Another timer ticking away the same time is placed nearby that screen. When the image of on-off marker has been drawn on the screen, this timer catches its light and shows that time. Then, we can read the difference of the two timers as the total delay. A trial equipment succeeds to measure it along the real-time HD-TV displayed on Organic EL and also H.264 on LCD with a resolution of 0.1ms. The experimental values agree with the analytical characteristics.

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In this paper, we discuss collaborative and competitive work using four kinds of haptic interface devices (PHANToM Omni, PHANToM Desktop, SPIDAR-G AHS, and Falcon) when the size of a virtual space is different from the size of each workspace. By experiment, we make a comparison of methods of mapping the workspace to the virtual space in terms of the efficiency of work. As a result, we demonstrate that the efficiency of work is higher in the case where the workspace is uniformly mapped to the virtual space in the directions of the x, y, and z-axes than in the case where the workspace is individually mapped to the virtual space in the direction of each axis so that the mapped workspace size corresponds to the virtual space size.

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We propose a domestic tele-echography system linking between the patient's home and a hospital because of the demand due to increase in the number of patients by aging society and recent progress in portable echography enabled us to develop this system. In previous researches three-dimensional position of the ultrasound probe was difficult to specify because a remote doctor observe the patient through a video camera. Therefore we have developed a reproduction system of the probe position and angle using the ARToolKit and GUI interface using OpenGL. Only an USB camera and two markers for the body surface and the probe are necessary to memorize and transfer three-dimensional position of the probe. We have also designed a doctor side interface including echogram, patient scene and CG to instruct probe operation. As a result of evaluation experiments, guided position was satisfied to reproduce the echogram for diagnosis.

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In this paper, we propose a novel wearable haptic device to present contact sensations. Our goal is realization of a small ultra lightweight haptic device that enables mixed reality applications where people can move freely and two or more persons can simultaneously use. At first we clarify specification of a device weight and best way to present force to cutaneous sensation on the finger tip with an actuator. Then we propose a novel device which employs cutaneous sensation stimulation method utilizing wires that enables presentation of strong contact sensations by weak force. Therefore, we can make a small lightweight device (1.4g) by a small actuator. Moreover, since a response of an actuator also improves, quality force sense presentation is achieved. And the device can overlay the sense of force without barring ordinary manipulation of real objects or other users. Finally we present effectiveness of the device through experimental results.

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