This paper proposes The Rainbow Marker, a planar marker for estimating the direction of a light source using a structural color. A structural color is a color produced by microscopically structured surfaces that vary in appearance according to the viewpoint, the direction and the spectrum of the light source. The proposed marker contains a planar material which causes structural coloration. The direction of the light source is estimated by structural color pattern matching between an input pattern and referential color patterns. In this paper, two types of the marker were implemented, with a grating sheet and with a holographic sheet, to demonstrate that the proposed method is applicable in the field of augmented reality.

Traditional artworks like paintings, photographs, or films can be reproduced by conventional media like printing or video. This makes visitors of museums possible to purchase postcards, posters, books, and DVDs of pictures and/or movies shown at the exhibition. However, newly developing arts so called interactive art, or new media art, has not been able to be reproduced due to limitation of functionalities of the conventional media. In this article, the authors report a novel approach of sharing such interactive art outside the exhibition, so that the visitors of the museum can take a copy to home, and even share it with non-visitors. The authors build up their new projector-and-camera (ProCam) based interactive artwork for exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) by using Apple's iPhone. The exactly same software driving this artwork was downloadable from Apple's App Store --- thus all visitors or even non-visitors could enjoy the same experiment at home or wherever they like.

This research aims at constructing an intrinsic tactile interface for ubiquitous haptic AR. In order to avoid obstruction of natural object manipulation with the fingertip, we focused on electrotactile interface. We proposed a time division multiplexing technique with compensating processes allowing detection and augmentation of touch feeling through shared electrodes. In this paper, we investigated the performance as a sensor and display by a pressing task. First, we obtained an optimized parameter for the multiplexing. Next, the stimulus effect on the sensor performance was tested. Finally, we confirmed that the proposed interface has a potential to modulate user's cutaneous feeling.

Most of the materials in the world absorb and diffuse liquid through their bodies. Porous media is a material that has internal pore space and is able to absorb liquid, such as a sponge or soil. Liquid flow of the porous media has been intensively studied in geotechnical engineering. However, previous studies never considered the elasticity change by the portion of liquid in the porous media. Liquid absorbed by the porous media affects the elastic property of the porous media and, hence, its behavior. This study proposes a model including the elasticity change of the porous media by liquid flow.

Colors in nature can be classified into two categories: pigment colors and structural colors. Structural colors, which are caused by optical path differences of reflected rays in microstructures, change depending on viewing angle and lighting conditions. In the present paper, we propose a generic approach for rendering structural colors in real-time. The proposed method uses optical path differences as common parameters to allow unified treatment of various types of microstructures, such as thin films, multilayer films, and diffraction gratings. To achieve real-time rendering, we store pre-computed information related to specific microstructure and lighting conditions on several kinds of textures. The textures are used as a look-up table in the rendering process. The proposed method can be applied to objects that have arbitrary shape and enables rendering from any viewing direction and under any lighting conditions.