In metaverse environments, we test whether visual harmony between avatar appearance and text design shapes trait impressions. Using a within-subject design that manipulates avatar hair color and text color/font, we find that congruent pairs increase satisfaction and affinity and convey traits more consistently, informing design guidelines for expressive communication.

In orthodontic treatment for children, a method has been recommended to strengthen bite force by chewing a tube in a certain rhythm for five minutes every day. However, ensuring that children keep the training daily is difficult due to repetitive, monotonous movements. Additionally, it is not easy for guardians to keep monitoring and ensure that children are doing the training properly, biting the tube with appropriate force. Therefore, we aim to develop an interactive serious game that utilizes bite force as an input device, allowing children to continue training properly and allowing guardians to monitor their training situation easily. This study introduces a simplified tube-based bite force measurement device to assess and record the force of the bites, as well as training games using the device.

Kemo-mimi means the dog- or cat-like ears on a humanoid character, or the ears of the animal itself. Kemo-mimi is often used as an element of the avatar’s appearance. It is generally considered that the posture of animal ears represents the animal’s emotional state. And the idea has been used as a technique for expressing emotions in many cartoon and animation works. But despite this fact, there are few examples of studies on the emotions that can be expressed by animal ears. Therefore, we decided to investigate the relationship between the posture of the animal ears and emotions and to establish a method of expressing emotions using the ears. In the experiments, three-dimensional animations of animal ears changing posture were presented to the subjects, and they were asked to answer the emotion corresponding to the posture. The results showed that there was a certain degree of a common understanding of people’s impressions concerning the animal ears. In this paper, we report the emotions that can be expressed by the posture of the animal ears as revealed in this study.

We introduce a novel making method for kinetic garments, which can change their shape and are thus used for decoration and self-expression. Such garments are generally realized by attaching devices to garments, and wiring and control systems are required to make them. In particular, wiring becomes complicated when many actuators are used. This issue is an obstacle for fashion designers and increases production difficulty. We propose a power supply and communication method for devices distributed on conductive fabric. This method allows the individual control of devices on the fabric without complicated wiring. We use soft hair-like bending actuators, called Smart Hair, as devices. The present study evaluates the application of the proposed method to Smart Hair.

Playing is most fun when the end result remains unsure until the last minutes of the game. In team games, this means that both teams have comparable skill levels. When playing for fun, this can be hard to accomplish. Instead, game balancing can be used. We introduce a double layer balancing system for dodgeball. Augmented Dodgeball uses a virtual layer to balance differences in the physical world. In the virtual layer, players can choose their character they wish to play in the game. This contributes in more collaboration and teamwork during the play. In addition, we introduce individual parameters to each player based on their self-assessed skill level. These changes will not be introduced to the players. This allows for a more seamless balancing between player's physical skills without publically labeling the players based on their skill levels.

Impaired articulation, chewing, or swallowing can have a strong impact on Quality of Life. These behaviors can be affected by decreased oral muscle function caused by aging and/or certain medical conditions. Aspiration pneumonitis is a major cause of death among elderly people, and is triggered by impaired swallowing, mainly due to decreased oral muscle strength. To reduce the risk of aspiration pneumonitis, elderly people are often advised to exercise and train their oral muscles. Unfortunately, such training tends to be monotonous and it is often difficult for trainees to detect the effects of the training, i.e., improved oral function. To address this issue, we developed an oral muscle training game called Squachu. Squachu is composed of a non-contact tongue-mouth-motion detection system and a game engine. As motion is tracked using a depth camera, players play the game via mouth and tongue motion and do not have to wear any specialized equipment. Thus, the game is hygienic and easily accessible for daily play.

The Kitchen Knife Safety Educator (KKse) is a safety education system designed to teach children how to correctly use cooking knives. Cooking is important for children to learn about what they eat. In addition, that is also important for daily communication between children and their parents. However, it is dangerous for young children to handle cooking knives. Because of this danger, parents often try to keep their young children away from the kitchen. Our proposed system will contribute to not only improving children's cooking skills, but also improving communication between parents and children. The system composed of a virtual knife with haptic feedback function, a touch/force sensitive virtual food and a two-dimensional force sensitive cutting board. This system was developed to teach a fundamental cutting method, the “thrusting cut”. This paper describes the detail of the system.

Breathing clothes are media artworks formed as an application of the hairlytop interface. The hairlytop interface is an assembly of fine, soft and deformable actuators. Each actuator is composed of a shape memory alloy (SMA) and drive circuits. Various types of sensors can be connected to the driving circuits. The actuators can then deform in reaction to surrounding stimuli, including light, sound, and human activity. The high flexibility of this configuration and its unique motion enables us to compose various interface types, such as furry decorated interfaces and new deformable textiles. In this paper, we describe in detail several types of clothes composed of this unique fabric combined with the hairlytop interface. The clothes act based on the wearer's breathing action, which acts as an indicator of the emotional state of the wearer.

There has been much research on interactive surface displays, which are displays that can change the geometric state of their surfaces actively. Most of these displays consist of multiple haptic units, which are composed of pins that actively move up and down. The envelope of these pins mimics the surface shape of an arbitrary object. However, it is difficult to improve the spatial resolution of such displays and to enlarge the display area because of the physical complexity. In this research, we propose the hairlytop interface, which is a collection of hair-like soft actuators composed of shape memory alloy. The proposed interface is capable of improving spatial resolution and can be used in developing larger surface displays. This paper details the hairlytop interface and discusses assumed applications.

Children with Down syndrome have a variety of symptoms including speech and swallowing disorders. To improve these symptoms, tongue training is thought to be beneficial. However, inducing children with Down syndrome to do such training is not easy because tongue training can be an unpleasant experience for children. In addition, with no supporting technology for such training, teachers and families around such children must make efforts to induce them to undergo the training. In this research, we develop an interactive tongue training system especially for children with Down syndrome using SITA (Simple Interface for Tongue motion Acquisition) system. In this paper, we describe in detail our preliminary evaluations of SITA, and present the results of user tests.

Along public pathways, visual signs and audio cues are used by pedestrians to guide them into forming smoother pedestrian flows. However, often ignored or neglected, these signals require greater pedestrian attentiveness and appropriate conscious effort. To solve this problem, we have proposed the concept of "vection field". This is a field of optical flow that cues movement according to a pedestrian's motion. Visual stimulus within this optical flow leads pedestrians innately in specific directions without requiring direct interventions. We have implemented such a field by covering the ground with a lenticular lens screen; in this setup, neither power supply nor position tracking of pedestrians is necessary. An experimental result from our previous study shows that a vection field can direct pedestrians to one side. However, the quality of the optical flow such as image clarity and smoothness of motion was unsatisfactory in that it could cause a reduction in leading inducement. In this paper, we describe in detail a new display method involving a lenticular lens screen that yields an improvement in the quality of the vection field and ultimately pedestrian optical flow. Experiments showed improvements over previous attempts.

Previous research on augmented reality has been mainly focused on augmentation of visual or acoustic information. However, humans can receive information not only through vision and acoustics, but also through haptics. Haptic sensation is very intuitive, and some researchers are focusing on making use of haptics in augmented reality systems. While most previous research on haptics is based on static data, such as that generated from CAD, CT, and so on, these systems have difficulty responding to a changing real environment in real time. In this paper, we propose a new concept for the augmented reality of haptics, the SmartTool. The SmartTool responds to the real environment by using real time sensor(s) and a haptic display. The sensor(s) on the SmartTool measure the real environment then send us that information through haptic sensation. Furthermore, we will describe the prototype system we have developed.