Globalization and the effect of recent infectious disease are changing the remote conversations as a new normal in business meetings, social provision and casual chatting. Previous research show that the remote conversations have a difficulty on showing the presence or attention to the other interlocutors, especially in the situation where the majority of interlocutor share the same place and one or a few interlocutor participate from difference place. This paper proposed "Parappa", a remote video conversation system, for those unbalanced condition by utilizing both physical and virtual approaches to share the nonverbal behaviors of remotely-participating interlocutor. The proposed system is constructed with a rotatable screen which projects the life-size avatar of remote interlocutor. The rotation of the screen represents the body posture and the projected avatar show the gesture. The results of preliminary analyses of eye gaze activities and frequency of the screen rotation during conversation suggests the possibilities that proposed system enables to show the presence of remote interlocutors.

We developed an embedded vision system that can accelerate the basic image processing functions for mobile robot navigation with compact hardware featuring low power consumption. The system is composed of a digital signal processor (DSP) and a dedicated LSI for low-level image processing, specifically for spatial filtering, feature extraction, and block matching operations. The image processing LSI has a dedicated systolic array processor consisting of 64 processing elements to accelerate basic block operations for image feature calculation and correlation-based image matching. The power consumption is only 10 W, about one-seventh that of a typical Pentium 4 personal computer, but the processing speed for correlation matching is roughly three times faster than such a system. With this vision system, we implemented a stereo-vision based navigation algorithm on our mobile service robot and performed a visual navigation experiment in a building hallway