We have been studying the use of "Rich Media" to support creative and intelligent human activities. Specifically, for over ten years we have been focusing on the 3D space as a "Rich Medium" and developed many 3D sketch systems that support the design of 3D objects. However, we found that designers in the real world do not use them. The fundamental problem is the lack of an indispensable function for using the 3D space. To overcome this problem, we have proposed "life-sized and operable" design principles. Although the new design concept made the 3D space truly useful and promoted the designer to use such a system, it revealed new problems, i.e., Limited design space. In this paper, we extend this "life-sized and operable" 3D sketch system by using three design spaces, which enables the user to traverse between 2D drawing and 3D drawing spaces, between miniature and actual sizes, between rough sketching and precise design, and among still, operable, and hap tic sketching.

Plagiarism by the copy and paste of documents written by other authors has recently become a large problem as electronic documents have increased. In higher educational institutions, it is also of great concern in student reports. In this paper, we have proposed a novel method to automatically detect plagiarism, especially for reports in Japanese and focusing on noun correspondence and the structure of parts of speech for each sentence. We have also performed experiments to evaluate our method with actual experimental reports written by our students to confirm its effectiveness.

We have been studying the creativity-centered media to ensure that systems truly support creative and intelligent human activities. However, it has gradually become obvious that current advanced support systems have a serious drawback: instead of promoting creative work, they often discourage creativity or let us stop thinking. In this paper, we focus on the 3D sketch system that supports the design of 3D objects by drawing them in the 3D space directly, because they are not used by designers in real fields but are just treated as a mere attraction in an amusement park. We propose three design principles, “Memory Capacity”, “Cognitive Mode”, and “Life-size and Operability”, which make the 3D sketch system truly useful for the designer. They have been gradually derived in the accordance with our cognitive experiment and developing series of 3D sketch system.

Unlike documents, annotation for multimedia information needs to be input as text, not in the form of symbols such as underlines and circles. This is problematic with keyboard input for non-alphabetical languages, especially the East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese, because it is labor intensive and imposes a high cognitive load. This study provides a quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of making annotations by hand during a note-taking task in Japanese. Although the lessons learned from this study come from Japanese text input, they are also generally applicable to other East Asian Languages which use ideographic characters such as Chinese. In our study, we focused on both the ergonomic and cognitive aspects and found that during annotation and note-taking task input by hand is more effective than input by keyboard. Finally, we anatomized the keyboard input problem and discuss it in this paper.

The informal information can be so intuitive, emotional, personal, honest and subjective that it is very difficult to get them from the formal media. In this paper, we demonstrate a multimedia informal communication support system whose basic architecture is a combination of a wearable computer, a see-through head mounted display, a bone conduction speaker, and a 3D-pen. The user can create a "multimedia" graffiti such as a handwritten memo or a voice memo and place it in a real-world "multimedia" context such as at a certain location (by GPS), environmental sound, the real object (by RFID) and so on. The multimedia informal information is thus shared with others on the peer-to-peer self-organized network. We demonstrated the prototype system and conducted a preliminary evaluation

We developed a programming environment that promotes logic development in children. Dealing with the real materials in their play environments is important for children using this programming environment. Based on our analysis, we propose a concept model and the user interface for a play environment for children. We confirmed the effectiveness of the programming environment experimentally.

This paper presents a novel system which learns how the users want to control the entertainment robot with intuitive gestures. Two major problems are focused on this paper. One is how to distinct the user intuitive gestures, another is how to make the correspondence between the gestures and the control commands. Users want to use their own gestures which are not known a priori. These gestures must be classified by the systems by themselves. After the classification, the system must interpret the user intention to the control command which the user want to input. For instance, one may use waving hand gesture as the shutdown command, and another may assign the same gesture to the different command such as turning around. The primitive systems are implemented on the entertainment robot named AIBO. AIBO recognizes the gestures which are classified using Self-creating and organizing neural network. AIBO also learns how to interpret them into its command using Q-Learning technique. Some experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Many household electrical appliances that use information technology have recently been developed. We can operate these appliances from anywhere, and research has shown that such appliances support users in their daily lives. The basis for supporting the user is detecting repetitive operation by the user. We think it is important for a home agent to detect user operation and consider the users feeling when they are operating the appliance. The home agent takes into account the degree of importance and pleasure of the operation pattern. In this paper, we propose a home agent that predicts the user's operation, detects forgotten operation and supposes a degree of importance and pleasure for an operation pattern and evaluated its performance in a simulated environment.