In this paper, we propose a method for creating a Kinetic Clothes with a scalable shape-changing interface. The Kinetic Clothes is a clothes which is composed of a deformable garment and changes its shape along wearer’s biometric information. Many of the conventional Kinetic Clothes are composed of motors and shape memory alloys. Then their systems are difficult for fashion designers to implement from the beginning since it requires wide range of knowledge in engineering. Therefore, we tried to adopt a scalable shape changing interface and propose a toolkit system to create Kinetic Clothes with the interface. With the toolkit, the user who does not have an experience in engineering can create the Kinetic Clothes. The detail of the created Kinetic Clothes and the workshop with the toolkit are described in the paper.

Getting enough movement is crucial for people of any age group. In the modern world, the lifestyle has become increasingly sedentary, so getting enough physical activity in a day relies on the free will of people during their leisure time. Augmenting sports is a way to make physical activities more exciting, fun, and enjoyable by virtue of computer game concepts. However, to achieve these augmented sports, a system to detect events in the physical world and send them to a computer game engine is required. Thus, the reliability of such systems has a significant impact on the player experience. Especially in augmented sports with a ball, player-ball interaction is critical for detecting physical events. This paper discusses the hardware design implementations that are used in developing the augmented dodgeball thrower detection system. We discuss the system’s design iterations from the prototype with a helmet and RFID tags to the current glove system using a Hall sensor and magnets on the ball. We overview the overall mechanical design considerations to make the system light and portable, details about calibrating, and sensor placement. The described sensor calibration and placement improved the accuracy of detecting the ball near the sensor and therefore improved recognizing the player-ball interaction event during the game.

Binocular parallax provides a cue for the depth information when viewing a scene with both eyes. In visual telepresence systems, stereo cameras are commonly used to simulate human eyes. However, quick rotation of the cameras leads to motion blur. The use of 360-degree camera can reduce the motion blur but does not provide correct interpupillary distance. We propose a concept and method named TeleParallax, in which we use two 360-degree cameras spacing at an interpupillary distance and keep the direction of the lens constant in the world coordinate by robotic arms during three-dimensional head rotations. We considered that this method can suppress the increase of image buffers because each camera can capture the omni-directional image with the lens direction fixed. This paper introduces the design of the camera system and its potential for visual telepresence.

Whether it is possible to induce stronger and steady kinesthetic illusions by multi-point vibratory stimulation was investigated. We placed seven vibrators on the arm and presented a total of 127 (2⁷ - 1) vibration patterns by turning each vibrator on and off, and asked participants to evaluate the illusion subjectively. The mean angular velocity and the mean subjective evaluation value increased significantly with the number of actuated vibrators. However, the illusion’s angular velocity did not increase dramatically. In short, the proposed method was effective for inducing vivid illusions steadily.

The parasitism of plants on the human body often appears in fiction, however until now it was limited to the expression in media such as novels, illustrations, and movies. Therefore, we created "Brain Tree" which enables appreciators to experience the sensation of plant parasitizing on their head. In this work, we used a head massager to present the sensation of plant roots invade the head. Furthermore, various tactile expressions are incorporated to enrich the experience such as the feeling that water penetrates into the head by watering, the feeling that the parasitic plant absorbs the nutrients in the appreciator’s head, and the feeling of the plant swaying in the wind. In this paper, we report the system design, implementation, experience design, and appreciators’ feedbacks in exhibitions.