Existing studies have reported that the Full Body Ownership Illusion let users perceive a virtual body as our own body. It has also revealed the Proteus Effect that avatars’ appearance could affect user’s behavior, attitude and mental condition by inducing the Full Body Ownership Illusion. While many studies have focused on a humanoid avatar and its psychological effects, a previous study has reported that the Full Body Ownership Transfer can be induced even in the case of an animal avatar. In case of inducing the Full Body Ownership Transfer on an animal avatar, it can be expected to induce the psychological effect different from the one by a human avatar. Hence, this study examines a dragon avatar, which has impression of strong body and flight ability, can reduce the fear of height as the Proteus Effect by the Full Body Ownership Transfer. We carried out an experiment with some scenarios where a subject transformed into a dragon and flied into a height, comparing with operating a human avatar. The results showed that transforming into the dragon avatar can improve subjective score and physiological reaction for the fear of height.

We have proposed a method to detect barriers on the road using the walking data of pedestrians. However, since users who measure and provide walking data do not obtain a benefit directly, they are unlikely to be willing to collect walking data. Hence, we propose a walking data gathering system using gamification. The proposed system meets both of the following requirements: 1) the user can collect walking data appropriate for barrier detection, and 2) the user can keep up motivation because of the game story. The results of the experiment show that our proposed system could improve motivation for collecting walking data.

Worker’s presence sharing is important for smooth communication in a teleworking environment. The worker’s state estimation system for presece sharing must be adapted to the environments of each worker. This research proposes a new method for creating a worker’s state estimation system through cooperation between humans and machines. In many companies, workers telework from far away in various conditions, but are still required to effectively collaborate with one other. Many studies of human state estimation have reported a high estimation accuracy using machine learning. To create an estimator by the conventional method requires enormous amounts of learning data, and creating this data is a heavy manual task. The proposed method is create an estimator that reduces the manual task through the cooperation between people and computer systems. A prototype system was developed and tested in two workspaces. The proposed system reduced the manual task by approximately 60% and 80% in Workspace 1 and 2, respectively. The estimation accuracy was up to 90% in each workspace. The proposed method was effective in simplifying and reducing the manual task.

There have been many studies on cross-modal interfaces by interaction among multiple sensory modalities. Most of the previous studies utilize the cross-modal phenomenon as a means to give a new stimulus or to enhance stimuli. In this paper, we propose the diminished reality method for a pressure stimulus by the cross-modal phenomenon. Our method generates cross-modal phenomenon by the mismatch between visual stimulus and pressure stimulus by using reverse reproduction of video. The experimental results showed that the pressure perception can be reduced by the mismatch between visual stimulus and pressure stimulus in both smartphone mode and HMD mode.

This paper clarified the basic characteristics of a new prototype of a sheet type piezoelectric sensor. And we discovered that the frequency characteristics of this sheet type piezoelectric sensor change depending on the input impedance of the connected preamplifier. Furthermore, we have proved that this sheet type piezoelectric sensor can actually measure heartbeat signals. We propose a new heartbeat signal measurement method with unconstrained using a sheet type piezoelectric sensor. In this new measurement method, two signals of the cardioballistic and the phonocardia are measured simultaneously by one sensor. It is expected to improve the problem that heartbeat signals cannot be measured due to the effects of ambient noise and body movement.

In recent years, utilizing of an avatar is becoming popular at social VR contents. On the other hand, previous studies have reported that an avatar gives us positive effect in terms of the sense of immersion, a psychological effect, and the spatial awareness. Thus, we investigate how the avatar which a virtual body is used daily in social VR contents impact on the body ownership and the Quality of Experience, comparing with a realistic humanoid avatar. Our results show that the self-avatar can improve the sense of body ownership and the sense of immersion.

There are many researches on cross modal interface using interaction between senses. Especially with regard to haptics, “pseudo-haptics” is well known. In conventional methods, pseudo-haptics is evoked by displacing the position of the force sense presentation, but it is difficult to use this manner in a mixed reality space based on a real space. In this paper, we examined pseudo-haptics evoked by dynamically displacing user’s viewpoint in video see-through environment. We implemented the experimental system in a VR environment and conducted experiments that verify the effectiveness of the proposal method and the degree of the force sense that is evoked in the directions of resistance and suction force.

In exhibition settings such as art galleries or museums, Augmented Reality (AR) has the potential to provide detailed information about exhibits. While most existing systems provide only general information overlaid on top of the arts, our AR guide system aims to explain multi-section detailed information hidden in the painting. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of our AR guide system in the Microsoft HoloLens and 5 guiding interfaces: Audio, Arrow, Circle, Arrow-Move, and Circle-Move that point out a specific part of the exhibit and explain the detailed information. We also included an embodied agent (EA) as a virtual guide to help engage the user when explaining the detailed information. We conducted a user experiment that simulates guidance for a large painting to evaluate user experiences with and without the EA condition for these interfaces. Results showed that guidance from the EA significantly increased either attractiveness, stimulation, or novelty for the system.

In recent years, a service industry is becoming to core of market economics. However, amount of worker are decreasing due to decreasing birthrate and aging population. To hire and train new human resources takes temporal, monetary and human cost. Previous studies have developed training simulator to resolve this issue. However, there is no research that focus on hospitality industry, as long as we know. Hence, we developed Virtual Reality training simulator for ground staff in airport. Specifically, on the basis of theory into practice, we developed a training simulator that can do training repeatable in a short time to maintain a motivation for a job. This system scans user’s facial expression and body movement, and convey to other user via an avatar. We were able to develop training simulator that gives us the feeling of a social presence from grand staff’s comments.

We constructed a haptic presentation system based on haptic primary color which reproduces various tactile sensations of real materials for interactive VR application. This system consists of two components of wearable tactile display which presents vibration and temperature stimuli and stationary encounter-type haptic display which presents force stimulus. The parameter sets of each stimulus was tuned in advance in order to reproduce tactile sensations of thirteen real material samples. To evaluate this system, we conducted two experiments. In the first, how much influence of force presentation was examined, and it was found that evaluated similarities of most samples were improved by presence of force sense. In the second, multiple regression analysis was conducted to estimate the contribution ratio of each stimulus, and it was found that each material sample had particular weights of stimuli for reproducing the tactile sensation.

We developed a novel ball-shaped interactive transformable robot 〈Column〉 consisting of eight modules that are connected to twelve servomotors for studying the nature of behaviors and communications in our everyday cooperative plays. Three users can control the above servomotors by swinging the wireless modules 〈Gear〉 simultaneously. In this paper, we proposed cooperative play mediated by the Column and evaluated user’s activities and preferences for the play. In the interaction, Column will become a social mediator to prompt the connectivity of the users. In this paper, we attempt to give the development, concept, interaction design content and subjective evaluation experiments. In subjective evaluation experiment, we revealed user’s impressions and preferences for Column’s behaviors and social reference and proficiency level in the cooperative play with Column. We revealed user’s feel more enjoyability to the proficiency level rather than the social reference in the cooperative play mediated by Column. We consider that this result caused by Column’s ability “impatience ”(Modokashisa).