Published papers

Children suffering with learning and developmental disorders require daily training to develop their social skills. However, such daily training is sometimes not provided because it requires interactive help from therapists, and lots of programs required for the training. In this paper, we propose a digital dollhouse that enhances traditional psychological play therapy with digital sensors and computer graphics (CG). The digital dollhouse provides immersive space for children, which develops their communication skills through their imaginary play through the complement of CG for enhancing the understanding of their situation. In this paper we present details of this prototype digital dollhouse. We also categorize requirements for digital play therapy, which are given by psychological viewpoints based on the prototype. Interdisciplinary design processes collaborating with engineers and psychologists show the possibility that digital dollhouses will be used for enhancing the communication, and providing the variety of training program that was difficult to prepare compared with the existent normal therapy devices.

Autonomous agents and/or robot embodiments are frequently introduced to a complex system in expectation of eliciting user behavior similar to human-human interaction with the target system. The current study examines the process and factors involved in this type of interaction. As a first step, we conducted a psychological experiment to examine animacy perception of the agent and its effects on user interaction with the system, here a microwave oven, comparing among three conditions: an embodied condition (with anthropomorphic robot features called agent triggers), a voice agent condition, and a control condition (no-agent condition). Additionally, we investigated differences between responses by age groups. Results showed two types of animacy, lifelikeness and intelligence; older and younger adults responded quite differently to the two agents conditions, which indicated that older adults placed more values on embodied agents. Hypothetical models of animacy perception in younger and older adults and their behaviors in interaction with the system implied the importance of perceived individuality of an agent and background knowledge an agent's function and abilities.

An office appliance, such as a multi-function printer (MFP) that combines a printer, copy machine, scanner, and facsimile, requires users to simultaneously learn both the manipulation of real-world objects and their abstract representation in a virtual world. Although many MFPs are provided in most offices and stores, their services are often not fully utilized because users deem their features too difficult to understand. We therefore propose a 'transitional explainer,' an agent that instructs users about the features of MFPs by mixing real-and virtual-world representations. Blended reality has been proposed as part of augmented reality. It involves the blending of virtual and real expressions to leverage their combined advantages. In this study, we utilize the advantages of blended reality to show users how to operate complex appliances by extending anthropomorphized explanations. A self-explanatory style is used by the appliance itself to improve the user's ability to remember features and enhance the motivation of all users, especially older ones, to learn the functions. With this system, users interact with the transitional agent and thereby learn how to use the MFP. The agent hides its real eyes and arms in onscreen mode, and extends them in realworld mode. We implemented the transitional explainer for realizing the blended reality agent in the MFP. In addition, we evaluated how this transitional expression supports users' understanding of how to manipulate the MFP and enhances users' motivation to use it.

Our daily household activities are supported by many complicated home appliances whose functions are difficult to learn. In order to clearly explain the functions of home appliances to users, we design attachable agential triggers to render home appliances as explanatory agents. We detail how our application helps explain the use of home appliances to users. Our proposed robotic arms are easier to use than previously used attachable arms in order to point to a home appliance.

Werewolf is one of the popular communication games all over the world. It treats ambiguity of human discussion including the utterances, gestures and facial expressions in a broad sense. In this research, we pay attention to this imperfect information game werewolf. The purpose of the research is to develop an intelligent agent "AI werewolf" which is enabled to naturally play werewolf with human. This paper aims to investigate how behavior contribute to victory of own-side players by using machine learning as a first step. As the results of investigation and analysis of the playing movie, we found that nonverbal information in the game of werewolf has importance to winning or losing the game.

This paper proposes a Blended Reality Agent called 'BReA' that can exist in both the real and virtual world and has communicative advantages that is more than simply the sum of those of a robotic agent and an on-screen agent. BReA can seamlessly transfer between the real world and virtual world and users can communicate with BReA without interruption during the transference. We conducted a field test and showed that users can recognize when it points from the virtual world to a real world object after it moves from the real world to virtual world. This result supports a hypothesis that communicating with BReA helps users recognize the link between real world and virtual world objects and virtual world information. © 2013 IEEE.

FlashTouch is a new technology that enables data communication between touchscreen-based mobile devices and digital peripheral devices. Touchscreen can be used as communication media using visible light and capacitive touch. In this paper, we designed a stylus prototype to describe the concept of FlashTouch. With this prototype, users can easily transfer data from one mobile device to another. It eliminates the complexity associated with data sharing among mobile users, which is currently achieved by online data sharing services or wireless connections for data sharing that need a pairing operation to establish connections between devices. Therefore, it can prove to be of particular significance to people who are not adept at current software services and hardware functions. Finally, we demonstrate the valuable applications in online settlements via mobile device, and data communication for mobile robots. Copyright © 2013 ACM.

The Turing test is an imitation game for determining the intelligence of an agent. In spite of its simplified setting, the use of natural language between two agents in the test is still too high a hurdle for achieving fruitful results in the field of artificial intelligence. In this paper, the authors propose a variation of the Turing test with a restricted communication method. This modified test uses behaviors generated by two-axis actuators for communication instead of the natural language dialogue used in the normal Turing test. This reduction of scope reveals what kinds of features are essential for an imitation game, and broaden the application brought by Turing test. When we learn what sorts of communication become possible with restricted actuation, we can apply this knowledge to any kind of robot or device in the real world. First, we tried to determine what elements are critical for communication between a user and a robot through a preliminary experiment involving human-human communication. A human manipulator received a video image as input and controlled a "robot box" with two actuators in a way that would lead a user to put other objects into the box. The results indicated what kinds of behavior are required to show the intention of the manipulator to the user. Second, we analyzed the result of the preliminary experiment, organized a behavioral model from the result, and programmed the robot box to run the model. The behavior of the robot was programmed according to the user's head and hand locations as identified by a motion captures system. The robot automatically interact with a human without human manipulation with this program. Third, we conducted a behavioral Turing test in a communication task whereby the human collected items according to the instructions of the robot box. In this test, two actuators on the box is controlled both by human manipulator and our program. The answers of users suggests that the users could not identify which is controlled by a human manipulator or the program. This result indicates that the Turing test succeed in a restricted behavioral level. © 2012 IEEE.

We propose an alternative approach to find each robot's unique communication strategies. In this approach, the human manipulator behaves as if she/he becomes the robot and finds the optimal communication strategies using attachable and detachable robot's shapes and modalities. We implement the system including a reconfigurable body robot, an easier manipulation system, and a recording system to evaluate the validity of our method. We evaluate a block-assembling task by the system by turning on and off the modality of the robot's head. Subsequently, the robot's motion during player's motion significantly increases whereas the ratio of confirmatory behavior significantly decreases in the head-fixed design. In this case, the robot leads the users and the user follows the robot as in the turn-taking communication style of the Head-free condition. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.