In organizational and team decision-making, it is critical for each member to engage in discussions from a broader perspective, without fixating on their personal values and knowledge. Self-distancing has been proposed as a means of supporting such a perspective; however, its role in multiparty group discussions with decision-making remains underexplored. We applied self-distancing to immersive virtual environments to examine its effects on group decision-making. A total of 144 participants (48 triads, aged 20–49) experienced two types of decision-making tasks under either a self-distanced perspective, observing their self-avatar from behind, or a self-immersed perspective, observing it from the first person. The results showed that embodied self-distancing significantly affected decision-making quality (improved consensus agreement and opinion inference accuracy), communication behavior (increased gestures regulating conversational flow), and group members’ perceptions (reduced intragroup conflict and affective interdependence). Overall, embodied self-distancing may be suitable for situations that require the prevention or mitigation of conflict but less suitable for situations that require empathy and attentive listening.

Considering the importance of self-disclosure in building relationships, it is vital to understand how people self-disclose when using communication media in cyberspace. By comparing four communication media (face-to-face, video, and embodied virtual reality (VR) with realistic/unrealistic avatars), we investigated the extent to which people self-disclose through video and embodied VR and how the gender pairing between the people disclosing and being disclosed to affects this. We analysed 144 participants (72 dyads) discussing personal topics. The results showed no noticeable difference in the degree of self-disclosure between video and face-to-face. The results also showed that embodied VR, especially with unrealistic avatars, facilitated more self-disclosure on personal feelings than face-to-face, whereas subjective experiences differed little between embodied VR and face-to-face. The gender pairing affected self-disclosure, with the female-to-female pairing having the highest degree of self-disclosure across many measures, regardless of the communication medium, particularly the disclosure of personal information. Furthermore, the higher degree of self-disclosure on personal feelings in embodied VR above was mainly because of the higher degree of self-disclosure by users who disclosed to a male. Potential explanations and implications are discussed.

This study explores how gaze visualization in virtual spaces facilitates the initiation of informal communication. Three styles of gaze cue visualization (arrow, bubbles, and miniature avatar) with two types of gaze behavior (one-sided gaze and joint gaze) were evaluated. 96 participants used either a non-visualized gaze cue or one of the three visualized gaze cues. The results showed that all visualized gaze cues facilitated the initiation of informal communication more effectively than the non-visualized gaze cue. For one-sided gaze, overall, bubbles had more positive effects on the gaze receiver's behaviors and experiences than the other two visualized gaze cues, although the only statistically significant difference was in the verbal reaction rates. For joint gaze, all three visualized gaze cues had positive effects on the receiver's behaviors and experiences. The design implications of the gaze visualization and the confederate-based evaluation method contribute to research on informal communication and social virtual reality.

Considering the importance of self-disclosure in building relationships, it is vital to investigate how self-disclosure is affected via avatars in virtual environments, as they are likely to become increasingly popular. Previous work has shown that using avatars increases friendliness and honesty. However, issues such as how and what types of avatars affect self-disclosure and reciprocity have not been fully explored. We conducted a study with 108 participants (54 dyads) discussing a personal topic using one of three communication media: videoconferencing, avatars with avatar-self appearance similarity, or avatars without avatar-self appearance similarity. The results showed that self-disclosure is most encouraged via the avatars without similarity. Reciprocity was formed via both types of avatars but not videoconferencing. Interestingly, although the participants disclosed more about themselves via avatars than via videoconferencing, there was no difference in their subjective experiences. It means that avatar users can disclose more about themselves without being particularly aware that they are using avatars, which suggests the usefulness of avatars to understand people's candid thoughts and feelings. Finally, we discuss the design implications for applications requiring self-disclosure.

In this paper, we investigate through a field study how the angles (horizontal, tilted, and vertical angles) of displays deployed in a public space (at a museum) impact the social behaviors of the people around the display. In the field study, we collected both quantitative and qualitative data of more than 700 museum visitors over a period of approximately three months. Findings of our study include the following: (1) the horizontal and vertical display angles have a higher honeypot effect, i.e., people interacting with a display attract other people, than the tilted display angle, (2) the vertical display angle, compared to the horizontal and tilted display angles, attracts several people to the display and encourages them to stay in the display space and share the space for a short period of time (88 seconds on average), and as a result, people frequently enter and leave the space with a display, and (3) display angles closer to the horizontal promotes the side-by-side arrangement, and display angles closer to the vertical promotes the L-shaped arrangement of F-formation. The findings in our study help design a public display deployed in museums and other public spaces.

We have developed a Shogi (Japanese Chess) support system on the Internet, called SAKURA. SAKURA provides an environment for Shogi with game and discussion support functions. It also has databases and interfaces with artificial intelligence to play shogi. The databases of SAKURA consist of a game record database and a position database. These databases have links to each other. As a result, information associated with game positions, such as comments, evaluations, and candidate moves can be integrated on a single system. We have conducted experiments to evaluate the performance of API for the databases. This paper describes SAKURA's database design and results of the experiment for performance evaluation. The performance is efficient enough to be extensively used by external artificial intelligence.

Human daily activities are stored in various kinds of data representations using ICT devices nowadays, named lifelogs. It is highly requested to retrieve useful information from lifelogs because these raw data are hard to handle. Extracting human activities from these logs is promising to enrich our life. Context-awareness services can be provided depending on user activities extracted from these logs. Recently, a lot of people post a message called tweet within Twitter to show what they are doing, thinking, feeling, and so on. Tweets have potential to record human activities, because many people post tweets so frequently every day. This paper focused on the tweets to retrieve human behavior from them. The length of tweets are limited within short sentence, so this causes some difficulties. The users will use domain-specific terms and will post grammatically incorrect sentences to fit with the constraints. These make us hard to analyze tweets with grammatical manner or with dictionaries. To tackle them, we are applying character n-gram tokenization and naive Bayes classifier to extract appropriate behavioral information from tweets. Using n-gram tokenizer, domain-specific words can be identified and incorrect grammar can be handled. Our approach is examined using real tweets in Japanese. The index of precision, recall and F-measure shows the promising results. Some experiments have been carried out to show the feasibility of our approach. At this point, our system applied to Japanese tweets but it is applicable to any other languages.

We have been studying the use of "Rich Media" to support creative and intelligent human activities. Specifically, for over ten years we have been focusing on the 3D space as a "Rich Medium" and developed many 3D sketch systems that support the design of 3D objects. However, we found that designers in the real world do not use them. The fundamental problem is the lack of an indispensable function for using the 3D space. To overcome this problem, we have proposed "life-sized and operable" design principles. Although the new design concept made the 3D space truly useful and promoted the designer to use such a system, it revealed new problems, i.e., Limited design space. In this paper, we extend this "life-sized and operable" 3D sketch system by using three design spaces, which enables the user to traverse between 2D drawing and 3D drawing spaces, between miniature and actual sizes, between rough sketching and precise design, and among still, operable, and hap tic sketching.

In order to achieve the intended level of communication with visitors in museums where large displays are installed, it is essential to understand how various display factors affect visitors. We explore the effects of the display angle on individual users. In our experiment, we set up three types of flat displays - vertical, horizontal, and tilted - and comprehensively tested users' cognitive, behavioral, and subjective aspects. The results showed that a significant difference could be discerned in regards to cognitive and subjective aspects. Test results for the cognitive aspect showed that the display angle on which the displayed content was easy to understand and remember differed depending on age. Test results for the subjective aspect showed that irrespective of age, users rated tilted displays as being quicker to attract attention and easier to peruse, to understand and remember the content, and to interact with, and such displays were the most preferred.

We have been studying the creativity-centered media to ensure that systems truly support creative and intelligent human activities. However, it has gradually become obvious that current advanced support systems have a serious drawback: instead of promoting creative work, they often discourage creativity or let us stop thinking. In this paper, we focus on the 3D sketch system that supports the design of 3D objects by drawing them in the 3D space directly, because they are not used by designers in real fields but are just treated as a mere attraction in an amusement park. We propose three design principles, “Memory Capacity”, “Cognitive Mode”, and “Life-size and Operability”, which make the 3D sketch system truly useful for the designer. They have been gradually derived in the accordance with our cognitive experiment and developing series of 3D sketch system.