The use of digital signage systems is increasingly common in public spaces such as shopping malls, train stations, airports and urban areas. In this paper, we present a new interaction scheme for digital signage that allows the passerby to keep him/her walking while getting a series of information. The innovative features of our system include estimation of the passerby's eye level based on features of gait on a pressure sensing floor mat device, and presentation of a 3D content considering his/her eye level.

Tabletop interaction systems have been explored actively owing to their advantages of allowing participants to collaborate each other by, in many cases, multi-touch gestures over a single, shared display. However, less research has been done on the exploration of localized auditory feedback. The authors have been investigating an interactive table system that is capable of presenting visual and auditory feedback, as well as gestural input. Especially, as for the auditory feedback, the system can locate multiple sounds simultaneously by controlling the loudness for 16 speakers mounted in the table. In this paper, we describe the design and experimental analysis of sound zone control, aiming to enhance the presence of sounds and interaction among participants in the interactive table environment. User studies indicate that the sound zone can be broadened when a source signal is accompanied by different delayed signals of it, while time intervals for sound position exchange over multiple speakers are not of primary importance in perception.

Nowadays, many people are suffering from the disease that their kidneys no longer function adequately. Knowing their own physical conditions accurately and then recognizing the necessity of self-management are the key to the exploration of a better quality of life (QOL) for such patients.

Searching the information is one of the daily activities in our living, where the web is the most common information repository. Effective and efficient search on the web is a key challenge. In this paper we propose a system for web search based on the visual structure (layout and colors) of web pages. Considering that interpretation of visual structures depends on individual perceptual characteristics, the creator and the searcher both participate in a session of expressing their own interpretation of layout and colors of a target web page. Web search is carried out by evaluating similarities between those visual page structures. This search scheme will help people to organize richer social networks with consideration of user's sensibility and preference to visual structural features.

Thanks to GUI, computers became usable by the people who donpsilat have a plenty of knowledge about them. Future interfaces should provide features that people are willing to use computers or, more definitely, computing capabilities. A pleasant nature would be the key to success.In this paper we present a multi-dip interface that makes use of total internal reflection (TIR) as a technique for sensing hand gestures under water in a tub. The water also serves as a display of computer-generated information. Neither lighting conditions in surroundings nor graphic images being projected on the water interfere with hand region detection. The system gets true hand gesture information at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Besides, the depth position of a fingertip dipped in the water can be obtained as well as its spatial position. Application of the multi-dip interface to drawing, language learning, and some others is presented.

Sophisticated multimodal interfaces are the key to success in future computer development and many ideas have been proposed so far. Augmented reality (AR) is such an idea. Computer-generated digital objects are mixed with objects in the real world, and they are perceptually assimilated. People don't need to be aware of the computer. What to do for them is just behave as usual in the real world. However, interaction with the objects is limited in existing AR systems. In fact, many of the systems allow the user just to change his/her viewpoint to real world objects. There are some other systems which accept manipulation of virtual objects, but they assume users wear or hold special devices. In this paper we propose a handheld AR interface supporting two interaction techniques based on the understanding that both real and virtual objects are compatible in manipulation. One of the techniques is for the user to directly manipulate virtual objects by his/her finger. One more technique concerns indirect manipulation of virtual objects. Motion of a handheld device serves as a trigger to make a certain change to target virtual objects.

The advancement of computer technology makes video devices/equipments powerful and inexpensive, and thereby the number of applications that can effectively utilize digital videos is increasing.In this paper, the authors propose a new type of video editing, which is based on the movement of objects. A video shot is automatically edited so that the selected objects are placed and kept at the center of the frames to make the resultant video more attractive. Ideally this is interpreted as applying pan, tilt, and/or zoom operations into a source video as post-conditions in video editing. Implementation issues for realization of this facility are also presented in this paper.

Summary form only given. This article discusses issues, challenges, and future directions in multimedia research, along the following three scale-oriented issues plus the one which is common to them

Nowadays computers are considered a common tool for everyday activities, including document management and message communication. This in turn requests us to carefully design computers so that anyone can use them without any special skill. Augmented/mixed reality and tangible interface would be promising toward the development of such daily use interface systems. In this paper, we propose a new interface which is named O-Key. O-Key allows the user with his/her hands to scoop up objects which are virtually floating on the water in a bucket. A certain function associated with the selected objects is activated. An experiment showed that the proposed interface works effectively. Possible application scenarios of the interface system are also presented

Computers are expected to be a tool for assisting people to enrich their everyday life. Computation performance was first augmented, followed by the improvement of communication capacity. It's time to provide computer capabilities to help people cultivate their intellectual faculties. Media research has been carried out for years. Researchers focused on utilizing media. What we should do now is to carefully analyze media itself, resulting in development of well-formed media for further success in media research. We are going to investigate how media convey the information and affect people $the way of their thinking. As a first step towards this goal, we propose in this paper the analysis and generation of picture books. A scheme of generating a picture from a text script is presented extensively.

Content-based video retrieval is one of the most active multimedia research issues. We propose a system for retrieving video data by means of mosaic images. Mosaicing is a technique of joining/merging frames of a shot into one blended image. The resulting mosaic image can convey three primitive features in videos, that is, background, (moving) objects, and camera work such as pan, tilt and zoom. Thanks to this capability, the user can retrieve video databases effectively by specifying queries encompassing the condition of these three types of video features.

We propose a method to stitch still images taken by a camera with translation and generate a panoramic image automatically. In such a situation, perspective parallax may arise at overlapping regions of two neighboring picture images, making stitching difficult if we use the existing algorithm in panoramic systems. To solve this problem, we introduce a technique of pattern detection and point-based matching. Pattern detection is carried out in two stages. The first is line detection, and the second is image segmentation. By using this technique, the system finds where the overlapping region is in each pair of neighboring images, and ascertains whether perspective parallax exists. If this pattern detection cannot extract a similar segment from two neighboring images, point-based matching is applied to complete panoramic image generation. Several points with significant features are sampled from one image, and their corresponding points are searched in the other image by point pattern matching.

In this paper, we present a technique called shallow copying on multimedia sources that can be done in a new authoring mechanism called virtual authoring. It can be used to create new documents by customizing and integrating existing multimedia documents without replicating them. Hence this mechanism provides the architecture to develop extended information layers on top of existing collection of multimedia documents.

Recently available low-cost personal computers and mechanisms to produce digital data have caused a staggering increase in the amount of multimedia data acquired by the user. Hence, the user's personal information space that consists of a large collection of files, may distribute over a number of computers. Situation-dependent metaphor methodology, described in this paper, provides a novel approach to managing such a collection with respect to the context of user's interactions with data. By considering the mobile computing environment, the physical location, time periods and activities are primarily used in modeling the situation metaphor. Sensors and software agents are used in capturing contextual factors automatically. Situation Space describes the theoretical foundation for the situation metaphor based information organization. We also presents our prototype engineered model, Situated Information Filing and Filtering (SIFF), to demonstrate the situation-dependent data management. The SIFF provides the framework for organizing the personal information and developing applications that require contextual information.

Retrieval is one of the challenging issues in multimedia database studies. Components of multimedia data such as image, video, and audio convey various meaning depending on the standpoint in viewing the data. Deriving the meaning of data, therefore, is not an easy task. At the same time, components of multimedia data inherently possess spatial and/or temporal relationships among them. These two aspects of multimedia data make data retrieval difficult without the support of specific knowledge for the proper interpretation of data and queries. In this paper, we provide an overview of existing approaches related to the issue of implementing content-based retrieval of multimedia databases and then describe a framework for enabling knowledge-assisted retrieval of audio visual content and their spatio-temporal relationship based on user cognition.

An object-oriented data model, MORE, in which the database specification facilities have been extended so that users can specify an object with various structures is presented. The structure of an object is changed by passing messages. MORE also provides a classtype, a user-defined type for classes with similar structures, in order to simplify the specification of class descriptions. The system generates operations useful for the classes by referring to a corresponding classtype. A prototype system and an example application are described.>

A framework for icon management which is quite object-oriented is proposed, and an iconic programming system named HI-VISUAL is presented on the basis of the framework. In the framework, icons represent real objects or concepts already established in a target application environment, whereas icons representing functions are not provided. A function is represented by a combination of two different icons. Each icon can take an active or a passive role against the other. The role sharing is determined dynamically, depending on the environment in which the icons are activated. Programming in HI-VISUAL and implementation issues of the system prototype, now in operation in a laboratory environment, are extensively discussed.>

In ARES, relational operations have been functionally augmented with an additional comparison operator. This operator implies `approximately equal to' or `similar to' for cases in which the user expects the system to perform a flexible interpretation of the query conditions. The functional augmentation is simply achieved by a combination of conventional relational operations. ARES is now in actual operation in a research environment, and will contribute to the next step of research toward implementation of highly intelligent data processing facilities beyond the present scope of database technology.

The relational database system ARES which authors have developed can manage semantic aspects of data to be retrieved, and has two types of relations, namely, conventional and semantic relations. The semantic relation is attached to a conventional relation in terms of a join operation every time a flexible interpretation of queries, accepting a certain amount of ambiguity in query conditions, is required. In order to overcome performance degradation caused by the additional join operation, the authors present an algorithm for parallel execution of a join operation assuming an architecture composed of one master unit and n slave units which are linked to each other. Here, relations are distributed to n slave units by means of hash. According to the static analysis of performances, it is expected that the execution efficiency of a join operation is improved by the extent of o(n) and o(n2) compared with the cases of a single processor using hash for restricting source-target pairs of the subrelations, and that not using hash, respectively. Further investigation, however, is needed in a dynamic environment.