論文

FEEL TECH Wear is a system that facilitates haptic interactions while keeping most of the palm free, by presenting directional force through rotational skin-stretch distribution feedback to the wrist and providing texture sensation through vibration feedback to the fingertips. With advancements in hand tracking and passthrough technologies, hand interactions in Mixed Reality (MR) environments have become more accessible, necessitating palm-free haptic feedback methods that do not hinder interactions with real objects or impair vision-based hand tracking. The hardware of FEEL TECH Wear primarily consists of two components: a hand-mounted device for each hand and a control unit located at the back of the head. The hand-mounted device is equipped with four channels of rotational skin-stretch tactors at the wrist and vibration tactors at the thumb and index finger. Using FEEL TECH Wear, three applications have been realized: haptic feedback for virtual objects, haptic augmentation for real objects, and haptic guidance towards objects.

Human dietary experiences are influenced by multiple senses. To promote healthy eating and reduce the consumption of unhealthy food, we have developed FoodMorph, a virtual reality system that immerses users in visually simulated food textures that are inedible. By presenting users with these textures, FoodMorph aims to diminish interest in and intake of unhealthy food while also assessing the dining enjoyment associated with common non-food textures. We found that concrete textures on food tend to lead to the lowest enjoyment score, which potentially effects their dietary habits.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) face the challenge of social interaction and communication, leading to them often requiring significant support from others in their daily lives. This includes challenges like basic communication to convey their emotions to comprehension in early education. To aid with their early development, we propose Furekit, a wearable toolkit that encourages physical interaction via audio and tactile stimuli. Furekit can be attached to various parts of the body, can be operated wirelessly, and is equipped with both a speaker and a vibrotactile actuator. The audio and tactile stimuli are triggered when touched via a conductive pad on the surface, aiming to aid these children’s learning and social experience. From our conducted workshop with children with ASD, we found that Furekit was well-received and was able to encourage their spontaneous physical movement. In the workshop, Furekit shows its potential as an educational and communication tool for children with ASD.

Vibrotactile interaction is an essential source of HCI and should be on a large scale, such as room scale, whereas in the past many devices have been small. However, there is a practical difficulties for implementing vibrotactile actuators and sensors to every furnitures in the room. To address this problem, our approach, HaptoRoom, archives reconfigurable ubiquitous haptic interaction to existing furniture without additional equipment by installing actuators only in the floor. A user can design detailed spatial distribution of vibrotactile pattern, leveraging with multi-point individual control of actuators array inside floor interfaces.

We present Heightened Empathy, a multi-user interactive experience in bioresponsive virtual reality (VR) designed to visualize emotional states and stimulate different types of empathy between two players in various interactive modes. The experience immerses users in a VR representation of each other's emotional state, while also reflecting this to the audience using a table-top social robot and projection as they interact with each other. In competitive mode, the goal is to promote cognitive empathy where each user needs to understand the new emotional representation in VR to win. In communication mode, we have users act on one another verbally to promote emotional empathy. The experience aims to enhance empathy perception by placing the players in virtual environments that require them to understand, share, and act on each other's perspectives and emotions.

By integrating haptic presentation technology and certain haptic sensors into online real-time communication, we can acquire subjective information on others through the sense of touch, and use it as a new standard for our own behavior. We believe that this will lead to changes in people's altruistic behavior, including cooperative behavior. This study investigates behavioral changes during tactile sharing using a behavioral economics scheme. We adopted a sequential public goods game where several participants in a group must exchange money. The haptic condition, where the investment points that other player put can be recognized with vibrotactile sense, and the visual condition, where the investment points that other player put can be visually recognized, were prepared. 32 participants were divided into the visual-first and haptic-first groups, and the haptic or visual condition was alternated between the 1st and 2nd sessions. The results showed significant effects on the haptic experience and correlations with guilty, indicating that the tactile sharing amplified feelings of guilt and made people less likely to act uncooperatively.

Robotic avatars can help disabled people extend their reach in interacting with the world. Technological advances make it possible for individuals to embody multiple avatars simultaneously. However, existing studies have been limited to laboratory conditions and did not involve disabled participants. In this paper, we present a real-world implementation of a parallel control system allowing disabled workers in a café to embody multiple robotic avatars at the same time to carry out different tasks. Our data corpus comprises semi-structured interviews with workers, customer surveys, and videos of café operations. Results indicate that the system increases workers' agency, enabling them to better manage customer journeys. Parallel embodiment and transitions between avatars create multiple interaction loops where the links between disabled workers and customers remain consistent, but the intermediary avatar changes. Based on our observations, we theorize that disabled individuals possess specific competencies that increase their ability to manage multiple avatar bodies.

We have developed a wheelchair-type human augmentation medium, Sli-de-Rift “RAY”, which provides people with a new motor ability called drifting safely. In this presentation, I will describe the design of the medium, the development process, and its social benefits.