We suggest that the real-time visual display of affective signals such as respiration, pulse, and skin conductivity can allow users of Web-based tutoring systems insight into each other's felt bodily experience. This allows remotely interacting users to increase their experience of empathy, or shared feeling and has the potential to enhance telelearning. We describe an implementation of such a system and present the results of a preliminary experiment in the context of a Web-based system for tutoring the writing of Chinese characters.

This installation provides painters with a method for feeling attributes of digital colors and a fluid canvas. When a user of this installation moves the stylus paintbrush over the digital canvas, he/she senses the "weight of the colors" through the brush. For example, the user experiences dark colors as heavy in weight and light colors as light in weight. Complex painting is expressed as a mixed tactile sensation using a new desk-style force feedback system called the "Proactive Desk." Other existing digital painting systems that use haptic cues usually aim to be physically and visually correct. In this approach, however, we invested effort in enhancing the relationship between digital colors as a virtual material and the sense of touch. Additionally, we took the importance of co-located drawing work space for creative tasks into account. We believe that this experience will arouse new inspiration and give digital painters the opportunity to experience again how important touch is for creativity in art.

We present a novel multimodal interface which permits users to draw or paint using coordinated gestures of hand and mouth. A headworn camera captures an image of the mouth and the mouth cavity region is extracted by Fisher discriminant analysis of the pixel colour information. A normalized area parameter is read by a drawing or painting program to allow read-time gestural control of pen/brush parameters by mouth gesture while sketching with a digital pen/tablet. A new performance task, the Radius Control Task, is proposed as a means of systematic evaluation of performance of the interface. Data from preliminary experiments show that with some practice users can achieve single pixel radius control with ease. A trial of the system by a professional artist shows that it is ready for use as a novel tool for creative artistic expression.

No abstract available.

An interface that involves all five senses, including olfaction, would be the ultimate interface for virtual reality (VR). We are trying to construct an olfactory display that does not require the user to wear anything on the face. We used an "air cannon" to transport small packets of scented air to the user's nose from some nearby place. In this paper, we report the ongoing development of an olfactory display system with a nose-tracking feature by incorporating vision-based face tracking technology.

The Proactive Desk is a new digital desk with haptic feedback. The Proactive Desk allows a user to handle both virtual and real objects on a digital desk with a realistic feeling. We proposed it for a co-experience web that would enable people to share the feelings and experiences of other users via the Internet. In the Proactive Desk, two linear induction motors are equipped to generate an omnidirectional translational force on a user's hand or a physical object on the desk without any mechanical link nor wire, thereby preserving the advantages of a digital desk. In this paper we report applications of the Proactive Desk and the performance of the first trial model.

In its simplest form, reality is merely information that is presented or acquired. Mixed Reality (MR) is built around the integration of real world physical and computer generated virtual information. We do not use the term augmented reality (AR) because we view the merging of both worlds as a symbiosis, with desirable properties from each accentuated and complementing each other, rather than the enhancement of one with the other. Collaborative MR allows multiple participants to simultaneously share a physical space while being surrounded by a virtual space that is registered with the physical. Because the MR world inherits the properties of real and virtual worlds, it is rich with social context, spatial cues, and tangible objects from the real world as well as flexible digital information from virtual. We believe that Mixed Reality is a medium, largely unexplored, but very well suited for face-to-face collaboration.

A novel head-tracking technique for a full-color stereoscopic video display system is presented. Using this head-tracking system, the stereoscopic area is increased by a factor of three and stabilized stereoscopic images are observed. Two kinds of large-size rear-projection stereoscopic display systems that do not require special glasses are proposed. Experimental tests, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed systems, are described. By incorporating these techniques into visual communication systems, such as TV telephone systems, video conference systems, or virtual reality systems, a very natural and accurate depth sensation which cannot be obtained by conventional systems that require the viewer to wear special glasses may be possible.>

This paper proposes an adaptive dithering method, which can reproduce grey levels with good character quality. It also proposes dither threshold patterns with long run-length, which are able to obtain a compression ratio of about 3 or 4 when using modified Huffman coding schemes. The method presented here is applicable to facsimile equipment for transmitting pictures, including both continuoustone pictures and characters, using CCITT standard black and white picture coding.