In metaverse environments, we test whether visual harmony between avatar appearance and text design shapes trait impressions. Using a within-subject design that manipulates avatar hair color and text color/font, we find that congruent pairs increase satisfaction and affinity and convey traits more consistently, informing design guidelines for expressive communication.

In orthodontic treatment for children, a method has been recommended to strengthen bite force by chewing a tube in a certain rhythm for five minutes every day. However, ensuring that children keep the training daily is difficult due to repetitive, monotonous movements. Additionally, it is not easy for guardians to keep monitoring and ensure that children are doing the training properly, biting the tube with appropriate force. Therefore, we aim to develop an interactive serious game that utilizes bite force as an input device, allowing children to continue training properly and allowing guardians to monitor their training situation easily. This study introduces a simplified tube-based bite force measurement device to assess and record the force of the bites, as well as training games using the device.

Kemo-mimi means the dog- or cat-like ears on a humanoid character, or the ears of the animal itself. Kemo-mimi is often used as an element of the avatar’s appearance. It is generally considered that the posture of animal ears represents the animal’s emotional state. And the idea has been used as a technique for expressing emotions in many cartoon and animation works. But despite this fact, there are few examples of studies on the emotions that can be expressed by animal ears. Therefore, we decided to investigate the relationship between the posture of the animal ears and emotions and to establish a method of expressing emotions using the ears. In the experiments, three-dimensional animations of animal ears changing posture were presented to the subjects, and they were asked to answer the emotion corresponding to the posture. The results showed that there was a certain degree of a common understanding of people’s impressions concerning the animal ears. In this paper, we report the emotions that can be expressed by the posture of the animal ears as revealed in this study.

We introduce a novel making method for kinetic garments, which can change their shape and are thus used for decoration and self-expression. Such garments are generally realized by attaching devices to garments, and wiring and control systems are required to make them. In particular, wiring becomes complicated when many actuators are used. This issue is an obstacle for fashion designers and increases production difficulty. We propose a power supply and communication method for devices distributed on conductive fabric. This method allows the individual control of devices on the fabric without complicated wiring. We use soft hair-like bending actuators, called Smart Hair, as devices. The present study evaluates the application of the proposed method to Smart Hair.

Impaired articulation, chewing, or swallowing can have a strong impact on Quality of Life. These behaviors can be affected by decreased oral muscle function caused by aging and/or certain medical conditions. Aspiration pneumonitis is a major cause of death among elderly people, and is triggered by impaired swallowing, mainly due to decreased oral muscle strength. To reduce the risk of aspiration pneumonitis, elderly people are often advised to exercise and train their oral muscles. Unfortunately, such training tends to be monotonous and it is often difficult for trainees to detect the effects of the training, i.e., improved oral function. To address this issue, we developed an oral muscle training game called Squachu. Squachu is composed of a non-contact tongue-mouth-motion detection system and a game engine. As motion is tracked using a depth camera, players play the game via mouth and tongue motion and do not have to wear any specialized equipment. Thus, the game is hygienic and easily accessible for daily play.

Agents like human, such as humanoid robots or avatars can be felt as if they have and communicate and communicate due to manipulation of the bodily information. Meanwhile, as in the case of Internet bot, it is still difficult to communiate the emotion described as text, let alone empathizing due to degradation of information online. The current study proposes a method for experiencing emotion on the Internet by reproducing a mechanism of evoking emotion. This method evokes a number of emotions described on the Web, by changing of self-physiological perception with sensory stimuli. To investigate the feasibility of our method, we made a system named "Communious Mouse." This system rewrites the perception of self-skin temperature and pulse in a palm by presenting vibration and thermal stimulation through a mouse device for evoking emotion. The current paper discusses the feasibility of our method based on the obtained feedbacks through an exhibition of the system.

This paper describes a passive stimulation of a body to evoke a walking sensation using a vestibular and haptic device while the real body of the user is sitting. It imparts a pseudo body image to the user through the real (physical) body of the user as a part of the virtual reality (VR) display system. The created walking sensation was evaluated by nine factors to analyze the complex nature of the walking sensation.

This study develops a method for improving creativity by changing the facial appearance of people during video conferences. We focus on enhancing creativity during human interactions, especially cooperative work situations such as video conferences. Psychological studies have revealed that the facial appearance of people can affect creativity, i.e., "emotion can affect creativity" and "the appearance of others can affect the emotions." Based on the knowledge, we hypothesized that the media technology which modifies the facial appearance of people appropriately can enhance our creativity during cooperative work. Therefore, we develop a method to affect creativity by changing the facial appearance in real-time, such as facial expressions and facial resemblance. We test the effectiveness of this method by building a system for collaborative video conferences. The user study show that the proposed method could enhance creativity.

The main contribution of this paper is to develop a method for alleviating fatigue during handling medium-weight objects and augmenting our endurance by affecting our weight perception with augmented reality technology. To assist people to lift medium-weight objects without a complex structure or various costs, we focus on the phenomenon that our weight perception during handling objects is affected by visual properties. Our hypothesis is that this illusionary effect in weight perception can be applied to reduce fatigue while handling medium-weight objects without mechatronics-based physical assistance. In this paper, we propose an augmented reality system that changes the brightness value of an object in order to reduce fatigue while handling the object. We conducted two fundamental experiments to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed system. Our results suggested that the system eliminates the need to use excess energy for handling objects and reduces fatigue during the handling task.