論文

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.

©2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). The emergence of prosthetic limbs where solely focused on substituting the missing limb with an artificial one, in order for the handicap people to manage their daily life independently. Past research on prosthetic hands has mainly focused on prosthesis' function and performance. Few proposals focused on the entertainment aspect of prosthetic hands. In this research, we considered the defective part as a potential margin for freely designing our bodies, and coming up with new use cases beyond the original function of the limb. Thus, we are not aiming to create anthropomorphic designs or functions of the limbs. By fusing the prosthetic hands and musical instruments, we propose a new prosthetic hand called "MusiArm" that extends the body part's function to become an instrument. MusiArm concept was developed through the dialogue between the handicapped people, engineers and prosthetists using the physical characteristics of the handicapped people as a "new value" that only the handicapped person can possess. We asked handicapped people who cannot play musical instruments, as well as people who do not usually play instruments, to use prototypes we made. As a result of the usability tests, using MusiArm, we made a part of the body function as a musical instrument, drawing out the unique expression methods of individuals, and enjoying the performance and clarify the possibility of showing interests.

©2019 Copyright held by the owner/author,. 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 paper, we propose an exploratory biomimicry-inspired anthropomorphic tail design to allow engineering and expanding human body functions. 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 describe the design and implementation process, and highlight potential applications for using such prosthetic tail.

© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Wearable technologies have been supporting and augmenting our body and sensory functions for a long time. Skin+ introduces a novel bidirectional on-skin interface that serve not only as haptic feedback to oneself but also as a visual display to mediate touch sensation to others as well. In this paper, we describe the design of Skin+ and its usability in a variety of applications. We use a shape-changing auxetic structure to build this programmable coherent visuo-tactile interface. The combination of shape-memory alloy with an auxetic structure enables a lightweight haptic device that can be worn seamlessly on top of our skin.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018. The Synesthesia Suit provides immersive embodied experience in Virtual Reality environment with vibrotactile sensations on the whole body. Each vibrotactile actuator provides not a simple vibration but we designed the haptic sensation to match virtual reality contents.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018. We have developed a wearable skin vibration sensor that allows users to touch objects directly. The sensor detects skin-propagated vibrations elicited by mechanical interaction between the fingertip and an object. Here, the sensor output includes properties of the user’s skin as well as the object. In this paper, texture presentation by using the sensor output is investigated. A simple tactile display is assembled with a vibrator. The experimental result shows that the texture presentation utilizing the inverse function of the transfer function of the sensor output gives more natural feeling as compared with the condition without the signal processing.

© Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Emotion regulation is an important part of humans' life and it is not only negative emotion that is harmful but excessive positive emotion could also prevent someone from achieving their goals. For example, high excitement that prevents someone from falling asleep. In our research, we are exploring the use of directional vibration patterns and embedding them onto a furniture to provide more accessibility to useful emotions. We have designed three vibration patterns and implemented them onto a chair-like cushion to evaluate the generated emotions in a user study.

© 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). In this research, we introduce an experience sharing platform that enables users to record and playback experiences accompanied with haptics. This platform makes it possible to record and reproduce haptic data with tactile sensation added to video and audio by smartphone using file format MPEG-4. In addition, users can share the experiences including haptics by uploading and downloading this haptic data to and from a cloud system. We expect to use it for applications such as finding haptic similarity using tags added at the time of recording. In this paper, we focus on the design and verification of the haptic device, the data format of haptic data, and the cloud system. As a result, we present the effectiveness of data compression and storage of vibration tactile sense into the MPEG-4 container.

© 2018 Authors. The purpose of this paper is to introduce using scalable autostereoscopic displays that allow users to interact with floating images publicly, such as for digital signage. By tiling multiple display modules, it is possible to project larger autostereoscopic images in the air than by displaying it using a single display module. By projecting autostereoscopic images, it is possible for the user to understand the contents in better detail compared to a standard 2D public displays. Furthermore, by projecting floating images, it is possible to reduce the spatial divergence between the user's body and the autostereoscopic images, so that the user can interact intuitively with autostereoscopic images. Moreover, since this system has scalability, it is possible to expand the screen size just by adding more display modules. This expandability makes the system easy to move and arrange in public spaces. In this paper, we propose an autostereoscopic display module which can enlarge the screen size in the horizontal direction as the first step to realizing our concept.

© 2019 IEEE. Haptic technologies applied as a means of fulfilling the social needs of dementia patients is an unexplored area of research. Patients with dementia face many limitations that prevent them from engaging with others. For example, as dementia progresses, it becomes more difficult to communicate verbally. We propose a multi-modal system that is personalized and incorporates both active and passive haptic elements can bridge the communication gap between verbal and non-verbal communicators and improve interpersonal relationships. We applied a community-centered design methodology to develop our technological solution so that it would be functional and appropriate for our target audience. We tested our solution, a book which incorporated haptic technologies, with our target audience, and our preliminary analysis of their feedback suggests that there are many opportunities in which multimodal systems can be used to improve the social engagement of dementia patients.

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). In the Pinocchio fairy tale, the nose of a boy extends when he lies. Inspired by this tale, we created a Pinocchio VR system that presents the feeling of the nose extending through body ownership illusion. This illusion is created by pulling the nose while presenting the visuals of the nose growing in the head mounted display. Our research that explored different combinations of haptics and visuals indicated that the the minimum requirement for this body ownership illusion is the visuals and the’nose-pulling’ haptic sensation. Thus, the PinocchioVR system consists of a head mounted display and an integrated haptic nose-pulling mechanism. Furthermore, in this demonstration, we explore olfactory and vibrotactile sensations as multimodal effects to present new experiences such as interacting with far away objects with your nose, extending the nose to smell foods at a distance, and even, experience what it would feel like to hang clothes on your elongated nose.

© 2019 IEEE. Blind marathon is a sport where visually impaired people can run with sighted guides in pairs. In this paper, we present an assistant system for blind marathon runners called "Synchronized Running" that improves the guidance experience for the runners. Our proposed system allows both runners to match their running tempo and synchronize with each other, similar to a three-legged race case, without any direct physical attachment. Two modules are located on the ankle of both runners, that measure the acceleration of the visually impaired runner, and provide haptic feedback to the guide's ankle according the tempo of the running pace. This synchronization allows the guide to grasp a comfortable running pace towards the visually impaired person, allowing seamless running communication between both runners. The evaluation results indicate that our system encourage runners (primarily novice guides) to achieve comfortable guidance running experience toward the blind runners.

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). In this paper, we propose "TeleSight", proof-of-concept prototype enabling asymmetric collaboration in VR between HMD user and Non-HMD users. TeleSight provides two interaction layers for designing asymmetric interaction, a physical layer for direct tangible interaction with players in VR space and visual layer that visually expresses VR space. Each layer is constructed by an avatar robot that imitates the motion of the HMD user, and a projection system. Non-HMD users can understand what happens in the virtual world by each interaction layers. Also, Non-HMD users can interact tangibly with the players in VR space throughout avatar robot. TeleSight provides that cooperative co-located gameplay between HMD user and Non-HMD users through experience scenarios using two layers.

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). In this paper, we present Synesthesia Wear, a full-body, customizable haptic interface, and demonstrate its capabilities with an untethered spatial computing experience. This wear not only looks as flexible as ordinary cloth, but also the attached modules are powered and controlled through this conductive textile via two-dimensional signal transmission(2DST) technology. The haptic modules have a pin, badge-like connector, and it can be freely attached on the conductive textile(Fig.1(b)), enabling users to personally customize the experience to their own liking. This module can render variations of haptic feedback to the torso and all limbs of the body, and visualize representations using LED light patterns. We also designed a spatial computing experience(Fig.1(c)) inspired by the perceptual phenomenon called synesthesia. The system provides an sensory blended experience in which the user walks around freely in real space. The user can interact with real and virtual environments, in a reality-overlapping way by wearing Synesthesia Wear.

Tactile sensation contributes to sensory-motor control and facilitates skillful manipulation of objects. If the tactile sensation can be shared between two partners, the state of each partner can be partially observed by the other, and the possibilities for cooperative work may be expanded. Recently, examples of utilizing tactile sensation in human-robot cooperative work have been proposed. For cooperative work between people, it is necessary to investigate the basic ability of humans to identify other person's motions and operations by tactile presentation. To avoid hindering work performed with the hands and fingertips, the sensation must be presented elsewhere. This study investigates the possibility of identifying other person's tool operations by presenting tactile information induced on his/her finger with a wearable vibrator on the arm. A wearable skin vibration sensor was employed to acquire tactile information during an experiment in which five different tool operations were tested. This sensor measures skin vibration while directly touching the target. We proposed a non-linear signal processing function to adjust the intensity of the skin vibration to within the range of human sensitivity for tactile presentation. We compared vibrotactile stimulation between the non-linear and linear corrections, and then conducted experiments on identifying operations. The results showed that the non-linear correction increased small signals and enhanced the variance of large signals, and that operations were significantly identified by tactile presentation to the arm.