Promotional media, such as paper posters and digital signage, are installed in shopping malls to recommend products and services. However, it has been reported that many customers tend not to be interested in these promotional media and do not receive the information. When product information is not communicated effectively, advertisers are unable to convey the information they wish to share with customers, and customers miss the opportunity to receive valuable information. To address such issues, a lot of methods have been proposed to make people aware of the presence of media; however, there are not many methods that take into account the delivery of product information to customers. In this study, we propose Popping-Up Poster, a pin-based poster device designed to capture customer attention and convey information through dynamic shape changes. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed system, field experiments were conducted in a café, where its promotional effects were compared with those of traditional promotional media, including paper posters and digital signage. These results show that Popping-Up Poster has the potential to be more effective in recommending products and influencing customer product choices compared to conventional promotional media.

This paper introduces a display technique to show gradation animation using a shape-changing artificial grass system. Recently, liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and projectors have been used in a natural public facility such as a park. However, these displays sometimes spoil natural scenery because they look like artificial materials. Our proposed method is useful to develop a natural landscape-friendly display. We develop a grass pixel system to display the gradation. The grass pixel consists of yellow and green grass, and the length of the green grass moves vertically. The grass pixel uses a pin-based shape-changing system using a stepper motor to control the grass length dynamically. We evaluated the gradation of the grass pixel through an image processing of HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value of Brightness) values. In the measurement, the pixel system moved the grass length from minimum to maximum, and we took images of the running grass pixel from several angles. As a result, we observed that the HSV values changed linearly with the movement of the length of the green grass. We also developed a 3 × 3 pixels grass display, which can show several gradation animations as demonstrations.

This paper presents a novel workspace for sharing a virtual space among multiple users with tangible interfaces and multiple perspectives. The multiple users can share a virtual space such as a spatial design through first-person perspectives (FPPs) and third-person perspectives (TPPs), and can discuss it while switching between the FPPs and TPPs. The workspace, named the Intermediation Family, is composed of box-shaped movable tangible interfaces, a fixed large display, a simple removable HMD and a computer that makes a virtual space. Since the tangible interface plays as both a user's avatar and a camera object for the FPP in the virtual space, the user can observe the virtual space from the FPP on a display mounted on the tangible interface while moving it. When the user wants a more immersive experience, she/he can also use the HMD. Moreover, the users can observe the entire virtual space through the TPP on the fixed large display. The multiple users can share the spatial design by switching their perspectives and exchanging the tangible interface and the HMD one after another. In this paper, two applications were implemented to hear opinions of some users. One is a virtual walk-through application, the other is a hands-on room layout application.