論文

Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Facial thermoreception plays an important role in mediating surrounding ambient and direct feeling of temperature and touch, enhancing our subjective experience of presence. Such sensory modality has not been well explored in the field of Telepresence and Telexistence. We present Ambient, an enhanced experience of remote presence that consists of a fully facial thermal feedback system combined with the first person view of Telexistence systems. Here, we present an overview of the design and implementation of Ambient, along with scenarios envisioned for social and intimate applications.

© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to Association for Computing Machinery. Gaze-based interactions promise to be fast, intuitive and effective in controlling virtual and augmented environments. Yet, there is still a lack of usable 3D navigation and observation techniques. In this work: 1) We introduce a highly advantageous orbital navigation technique, AnyOrbit, providing an intuitive and hands-free method of observation in virtual environments that uses eye-tracking to control the orbital center of movement; 2) The versatility of the technique is demonstrated with several control schemes and use-cases in virtual/augmented reality head-mounted-display and desktop setups, including observation of 3D astronomical data and spectator sports.

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. This study demonstrates that by opening and closing the human pinna, we can change the direction of sound perceived by humans. Each ear was independently transformed into a 100% open, 50% open, and 100% closed state, and all 9 combinations of these ear transformations were tested to evaluate the perceived direction of the sound output from 7 speakers placed 180 degrees around the subject. We demonstrate that by deforming the pinna, we could change the perception of the direction of sound, or make it illusory. We also found that except for 1 out of 7 speakers (or directions of sound), closing 100% of the ear on the side of the speaker where the sound is coming from and 50% of the ear on the other side of the speaker tends produce the most alteration to the perceived direction of sound.

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). For most mammals and vertebrate animals, tail plays an important role for their body providing variant functions to expand their mobility, or as a limb that allows manipulation and gripping. In this work, Arque, we propose an artificial biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic tail to allow us alter our body momentum for assistive, and haptic feedback applications. The proposed tail consists of adjacent joints with a spring-based structure to handle shearing and tangential forces, and allow managing the length and weight of the target tail. The internal structure of the tail is driven by four pneumatic artificial muscles providing the actuation mechanism for the tail tip. Here we highlight potential applications for using such prosthetic tail as an extension of human body to provide active momentum alteration in balancing situations, or as a device to alter body momentum for full-body haptic feedback scenarios.

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). For most mammals and vertebrate animals, tail plays an important role for their body providing variant functions to expand their mobility, or as a limb that allows manipulation and gripping. In this work, Arque, we propose an artificial biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic tail to allow us alter our body momentum for assistive, and haptic feedback applications. The proposed tail consists of adjacent joints with a spring-based structure to handle shearing and tangential forces, and allow managing the length and weight of the target tail. The internal structure of the tail is driven by four pneumatic artificial muscles providing the actuation mechanism for the tail tip. Here we highlight potential applications for using such prosthetic tail as an extension of human body to provide active momentum alteration in balancing situations, or as a device to alter body momentum for full-body haptic feedback scenarios.

The combination of eye and head movements plays a major part in our visual process. The neck provides mobility for the head motion and also limits the range of visual motion in space. In this paper, a robotic neck augmentation system is designed to surmount the physical limitations of the neck. It applies in essential a visuomotor modification to the vision-neck relationship. We conducted two experiments to measure and verify the performance of the neck alternation. The multiple test results indicate the system has a positive effect to augment the motions of vision. Specifically, the robotic neck can enlarge the range of neck motion to 200%, and influence the response motion, by overall 22% less in time and 28% faster in speed.

We are exploring new applications using haptic sharing. If we were able to capture and perceive the sensations and movements of others into ourselves, we could conduct cooperative works with others on the basis of shared haptic perception. We demonstrated human-robot cooperation by sending human haptic information during the task to the robot. Regarding human-human cooperation, humans need to perceive haptic information and identify the other's state on the task. Therefore, in this paper, the identification of different tool operations by presenting vibrotactile stimulation that reproduces the skin vibration collected during each operation was tested. Performance of the identification was investigated on different positions to present vibrotactile stimulation and on the multi inputs of vibrotactile stimulation.

This paper presents "Public Booth for Vibrotactile Communication", an interactive audio-visual-haptic media that allows us to feel the vibrations of the other people who share the same desk and face each other. The purpose of this research is to observe what kind of behavior people take when a higher presence is presented by tactile sensation in telecommunication. As the interface, we designed a pair of frames consisting of a curved screen to show the upper body and the hand of a life-size person, a haptic system to share tactile sensation, and a sound system. By installing the frames in multiple remote places and transmitting audio-visual-tactile sensation interactively, we observed what kind of behavior faced people do and what kind of communication was created between them. As a result, various haptic plays were created. Since the tendency in the development of haptic communication observed in the developmental phase of infants was also observed through this approach, it was clarified that the heightened presence provided by haptics for telecommunication contributes to the promotion of friendship.