It is said to be more difficult to concentrate in online lectures than in face-to-face lectures. Working towards an increase in desire to view lecture video, in this research we changed the appearance of a lecturer using virtual avatars (of which there are four kinds: young man & woman, older man & woman) and investigated whether a lecture participant’s viewing motivation was affected by video image of a lecturer made to look like their preferred avatar. In this experiment, in which 154 participants took part, participants were asked to select lecturers (including avatars) according to the participants’ preferences regarding appearance. Then, participants were divided into a group that watched their favorite avatar and a group that watched their least favorite avatar, before viewing the lecture video. In addition to subjective evaluation indices such as degree of comprehensibility and boredom, viewing desire was also investigated through objective indices, such as the result of a short test and a record of the time at which participants felt they wanted to stop watching the lecture. As a result, in every evaluation index, the participants who viewed an avatar for which they had a high degree of preference obtained a more affirmative result than the participants who viewed an avatar for which they had a low degree of preference, implying that viewing a preferred avatar has an influence on increase in viewing desire.

During recruitment interviews, the facial impressions of the interviewers likely affect the nervousness of the interviewees and make it difficult to conduct fair and consistent interview processes. To minimize the difference in facial impressions among interviewers, we have investigated a method to convert an interviewer’s face into an avatar. In this study, we used a digital full-face mask display capable of replacing the wearer’s face with an avatar in the real world. By reproducing the interviewer’s facial expression with an avatar in real time, we investigated the effect of avatar appearance on interviewee’s nervousness during interviews. Two types of avatars (a dignified face and a gentle face) were applied to three male interviewers in different age groups (10s, 20s and 60s). We compared the level of interviewee’s nervousness between before and after augmenting interviewer’s face with avatar. 172 college students were recruited as interviewees to assess the variation in the level of nervousness. Our experimental results show that avatar appearance can elicit more unique and consistent impressions than the interviewer’s real face and reduce the variation in interviewee’s nervousness level across interviewers.

This paper presents a thin digital full-face mask display that can reflect an entire facial expression of a user onto an avatar to support augmented face-to-face communication in real environments. Although camera-based facial expression recognition technology has enabled people to augment their faces with avatars, application was limited to face-to-face communication in virtual environments. To enable digital facial augmentation with an avatar in a real space, we propose a digital face mask display system that integrates a lightweight flexible display with a thin facial expression recognition system. The thin wearable facial expression recognition system was implemented with photo reflective sensor arrays which can measure facial expressions at 40 feature points distributed across an entire face. We investigated a ten-class facial expression identification model based on an SVM training algorithm. The trained model achieved an average accuracy of 79% when identifying the facial expressions of multiple users. User experiments indicated that the proposed thin digital full-face mask display allows the wearer to control the facial expression of the avatar with a fast response rate and create a positive sense of self-agency and self-ownership toward the augmented avatar face.

The purpose of this research is to propose a calligraphy learning support system focusing on brushstrokes. In conventional calligraphy, the learner imitates and writes characters while looking at a model placed next to the writing paper. However, it is difficult for the learner to learn the brushstroke characteristics, such as correct pressure and speed of brush movement, just by looking at a model. Therefore, we added an onomatopoeia utterance function to the conventional system to solve these problems. The onomatopoeia represents the brushstroke characteristics, such as pressure and speed. We compare the proposed method with the function to the comparative method without the function. As a result, it became clear that, when using the proposed method, correct brushstroke method could certainly be learned in a shorter time than with the comparison method, thus confirming the possibility of improving the calligraphy of proposed method.

This research leads to the development of a system that generates minutes while the system and user interactively structure and summarize the discussion. The system can look back on a meeting from a specific viewpoint or purpose by sending an inquiry to the minutes, receiving the result, and performing a new operation. To improve the reusability of the minutes, it is necessary to understand the semantic relationships among utterances at a deep level. We therefore propose a novel tree structure called the discussion time-span tree for representing a hierarchical discussion based on the relative importance of utterances derived from the meeting. The discussion time-span tree is a binary tree, each leaf of which corresponds to an utterance. Adjacent relevant utterances are hierarchically grouped, and the most important utterance becomes a head. In this way, the tree represents the implicit meaning and intention contained in meeting records, and can be used for summarization. Our system aims to grasp the main point of the meeting by interactively manipulating this tree structure and giving different viewpoints to each system user. An evaluation of the important utterance extraction using the proposed system showed that the score of ROUGE-2 was higher than that of the existing document summarizing technique. In a subsequent user evaluation conducted with ten participants, we found that the system can be used to grasp conference contents efficiently. The results of both evaluations demonstrate the usefulness of the system.

This research leads to the development of a system that generates minutes by using repeated questions and answers between a user and the system. The aim of the research is to provide the user with an interactive analysis of meeting records, with a specific purpose or viewpoint. To realize the system, we propose a novel tree structure dedicated to representing the hierarchical discussion structure of a meeting based on the relative importance of utterances underlain by the semantic structure of meeting records. The system uses flexible extraction methods, such as extracting intention, summarizing, and switching viewpoints, to extract the required information from the meeting records. The results of a user experiment demonstrate that the system contributes effectively to exploratory information retrieval. Furthermore, it was found that system users improved their comprehension degree significantly, compared to when not using the system.

Solo videojournalism has become a popular form of reporting for many television stations and online news sites. We foresee that television stations will amalgamate with Internet broadcasting services and the amount of this kind of live streaming content will increase day by day. In solo live reporting which refers to live streaming style Solo Videojounal-ism, a reporter will be struggling to deal with a lot of work, particularly because he/she cannot edit the report after shooting. This can be an overwhelming burden and may cause low-quality broadcasting and/or a reduction in the amount of information broadcast. The goal of our study is to design and implement a support system for solo live reporting. The functions of our proposed system, such as intuitive camera operation, time keeping, addition of captions will aid solo live reporting and increase the quality of video contents.

Recently, performances that combine performers' actions and images projected from a projector have attracted a great deal of attention. In such performances, since the performer usually faces the audience, it is difficult for him/her to watch the projected images on a background screen. This means that he/she cannot make the performances dynamic in response to changes in the situation. Therefore, we evaluate multiple information presentation methods for interactive performances. We have developed a prototype system for supporting performers and evaluated its effectiveness. We confirmed that differences in display devices and in the types of presenting images affected the quality of performances. The implemented prototype was actually used in several stage performances, and we confirmed that the system was effective and improved the visibility of projected images.

We recently have seen illumination using Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) on the street. The current illumination is difficult to control of flexibly and dynamically. In response to this problem, we propose a method controlling numerous LEDs collectively, dynamically, and flexibly by using a projector and small devices with optical sensors. We designed and implemented a small device to achieve our mechanism, which has an LED, an optical sensor, and a microcomputer to react to the light illuminated from a projector. Moreover, it has functions to self adjust the threshold and recognize optical commands, which are required for collective control. We discuss how effective our proposed device was in a study to evaluate it and in field tests done at actual events.