IMRC

This paper shows a framework of VR experience design that has a value in both business and social meaning by the user centered design process of this Heritage Alive experience. We interviewed each technology players (TA, TI, RCS research group) to understand possible technologies and to define best system setting of VR experience, then observed and participated a real (off line) heritage exploring event. Based on this real experience, we explored more economic, safe, and effective learning experience in Tangible Space. We developed a system model of Heritage Alive! and a usage scenario of Heritage Alive experience. Various user interactions are designed and tested to leverage immersiveness and entertainment in application scenario of Heritage Alive!.

Recently, as social media has taken place on an interactive TV domain, many researches have attempted to provide better emotional engagement and satisfaction. However, their approaches are still limited in utilizing many types of screens and supporting their social collaboration within a public setting. For example, when people are watching TV together, TV is not a suitable place to have a personal chat, and mobile phone is too small to support every sharing activity. In order to provide seamless social experience across any connected screens, in this paper, we present an N-Screen-based collaborative baseball watching system. It provides user engagement interfaces within a public setting and novel N-Screen interaction concepts.

As sensing, actuating and computing devices are becoming more available around us, more intelligent communication services considering a user context attract broad interests. One of the important problems related to communication services running on a ubiquitous ...

The UPnP(Universal Plug and Play) architecture offers pervasive peer-to-peer network connectivity of intelligent appliances in dynamic distributed computing environment. This paper shows that internal software integration of robot and robot service in ubiquitous computing environment are the same thing in nature. This paper also proposes to use the UPnP architecture as a unified framework not only for robot internal software integration, but also for ubiquitous robot control. This paper shows that the UPnP technology could provide a unified framework by describing the usefulness of the UPnP and by showing some experimental result regarding it.

The research to utilize UPnP as a network based robot middleware platform is in progress. For networked robot components, there is a need to transfer massive data such as multimedia contents. However, since the UPnP technology is using SOAP messages, it is not efficient to send bulky binary data in UPnP messages. In order to overcome the weak point, this paper proposes UPnP-MTOM, MTOM (message Transmission Optimization Mechanism) implementation over UPnP, as an effective way for bulky data transmission with UPnP messages. This paper presents our implementation method and experimental results of UPnP-MTOM implementation.

Providing proactive service requires careful treatment because it has many risks that may force the user to be insufferable with the inadequate services. The context-based interaction pattern is an important factor to personalize the services because it is the practical foundation to adapt to the user. It can be extracted based on the user's activity relative to time, space, and object. In this paper, we describe the methodology to extract user interaction pattern with an example, smart home.

The Web has become a source of information and knowledge accessed through search engines and various mining tools. In addition, it has become a platform on which not only software but also human users participate in and interact for various tasks. In an effort to mine actionable knowledge from the Web associated with various objects, we devised a text mining method specifically for extracting the actions often applied to various interest-triggering objects. Since the actions are extracted from how questions, they are considered needs or actions to be taken for the objects. We show that relatively simple yet powerful pattern matching techniques applied to the Web, in conjunction with the ODP taxonomy, can result in actionable need knowledge of high quality for a set of interest-triggering objects. To evaluate the quality of the extracted knowledge, we conducted two different types of testing: a controlled experiment with a small number of judges for desirability and an open experiment with the general public for comprehensibility.

Building an interactive virtual environment may involve diverse modules for performing various tasks like handling a group of interaction devices, multimodal/multi-cluster rendering displays as well multipurpose simulations. This requires a fine-grain sharing of inter-module states. Previously, this fine-grain control can only be achieved through hardware subsystems within a single computer. With advancement of network technology, it is becoming possible to achieve fine-grain control over a cluster of computers that are closely connected, hence, an interactive virtual environment with multiple modules distributed across a local-area network. Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) may involve distributed modules as well as distributed virtual environments that are shared across a group of user participants. In either case, the goal of DIVE is user's perception of interacting with a single virtual environment system; this is made possible through sharing dynamically changing state information across distributed objects and events. Depending on update rate and synchronization requirements of the dynamically changing shared states, the system requires from fine-grain to coarse-grain control over the shared states. In this paper, we introduce effective approaches to dynamically shared state management (DSSM) across the spectrum of control requirements by DIVE.

This paper presents a content structure for building mobile augmented reality (AR) applications in HTML5 to achieve a clean separation of the mobile AR content and the application logic for scaling as on the Web. We propose that the content structure contains the physical world as well as virtual assets for mobile AR applications as document object model (DOM) elements and that their behaviour and user interactions are controlled through DOM events by representing objects and places with a uniform resource identifier. Our content structure enables mobile AR applications to be seamlessly developed as normal HTML documents under the current Web eco-system.

We investigated the characteristic changes in the physiology of cybersickness when subjects were exposed to virtual reality. Sixty-one participants experienced a virtual navigation for a total of 9.5 min, and were required to detect specific virtual objects. Three questionnaires for sickness susceptibility and immersive tendency were obtained before the navigation. Sixteen electrophysiological signals were recorded before, during, and after the navigation. The severity of cybersickness experienced by participants was reported from a simulator sickness questionnaire after the navigation. The total severity of cybersickness had a significant positive correlation with gastric tachyarrhythmia, eyeblink rate, heart period, and EEG delta wave and a negative correlation with EEG beta wave. These results suggest that cybersickness accompanies the pattern changes in the activities of the central and the autonomic nervous systems.

To simulate solid dynamics, we must compute the mass, the center of mass, and the products of inertia about the axes of the body of interest. These mass property computations must be continuously repeated for certain simulations with rigid bodies or as the shape of the body changes. We introduce a GPUfriendly algorithm to approximate the mass properties for an arbitrarily shaped body. Our algorithm converts the necessary volume integrals into surface integrals on a projected plane. It then maps the plane into a framebuffer in order to perform the surface integrals rapidly on the GPU. To deal with non-convex shapes, we use a depth-peeling algorithm. Our approach is image-based; hence, it is not restricted by the mathematical or geometric representation of the body, which means that it can efficiently compute the mass properties of any object that can be rendered on the graphics hardware. We compare the speed and accuracy of our algorithm with an analytic algorithm, and demonstrate it in a hydrostatic buoyancy simulation for real-time applications, such as interactive games.

This paper presents a generalized framework for virtual reality (VR) theater that provides audience with immersive and interactive environment. This framework consists of interface, player and scenario especially for interactive storytelling. These components and relationships among them are defined in detail in this paper. And, we address some issues of VR Theater: flexibility and scalability. The proposed framework can offer a way to investigate and develop VR Theater.

We are currently developing a new tour guide service on mobile phone using augmented reality. Among the components for the service, in-situ annotation is one of the most important components for capturing of lots of personal experiences in the form of digital multimedia during his/her trip. Our in-situ annotation system provides several pieces of functionality that include recording MART (Mobile Augmented Reality based Tour) media format, transmitting the recorded media and retrieving the related experiences of others. MART media data should be easy for users to store, interchange and manage. Additionally, it can integrate various types of media, such as video, audio, GPS data, motion, 2D/3D graphics and annotated texts. For this, we define a new format for MART media, called MART-MAF, which can compose MPEG standards and non-MPEG standards for various kinds of media.

Virtual Reality (VR) as well as Augmented Reality (AR) environment can be used as media for edutaining. They provide pleasant environments for educating students through experiences. In this paper, we present a 3D edutainment environment which provides an experience-based learning environment for understanding the Newtonian physics law. We design a physics-based simulation application that simulates a domino effect in the 3D environment. Using this application, the user can learn physics by interacting and experiencing different kinds of domino effect in the VR/AR environment. We propose a new way to help the user tuning the simulation conditions to produce a desired simulation effect by illustrating an expected trajectory of the object of interest. Therefore, the user can easily distinguish the simulation results from different configurations by comparing the trajectories of the selected object.

In this paper, we propose an immersive panorama TV service system. The proposed system provides real-time panorama videos and/or images for smart displays such as smart TVs, smart phones, and tablet PCs. Panorama videos and/or images are collected at sports events by panorama cameras. Collected contents are sent to servers, and then provide to smart devices with sports live videos. Users can select their view among panorama cameras, and can choose their view angle and zooming factor inside selected panorama camera. The proposed system provides immersive and realistic views of sports live events on users television.