In this research, the authors succeeded in creating facial expressions made with the minimum necessary elements for recognizing a face. The elements are two eyes and a mouth made using precise circles, which are transformed to make facial expressions geometrically, through rotation and vertically scaling transformation. The facial expression patterns made by the geometric elements and transformations were composed employing three dimensions of visual information that had been suggested by many previous researches, slantedness of the mouth, openness of the face, and slantedness of the eyes. The authors found that this minimal facial expressions can be classified into 10 emotions: happy, angry, sad, disgust, fear, surprised, angry*, fear*, neutral (pleasant) indicating positive emotion, and neutral (unpleasant) indicating negative emotion. The authors also investigate and report cultural differences of impressions of facial expressions of above-mentioned simplified face.

Traditional artworks like paintings, photographs, or films can be reproduced by conventional media like printing or video. This makes visitors of museums possible to purchase postcards, posters, books, and DVDs of pictures and/or movies shown at the exhibition. However, newly developing arts so called interactive art, or new media art, has not been able to be reproduced due to limitation of functionalities of the conventional media. In this article, the authors report a novel approach of sharing such interactive art outside the exhibition, so that the visitors of the museum can take a copy to home, and even share it with non-visitors. The authors build up their new projector-and-camera (ProCam) based interactive artwork for exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) by using Apple's iPhone. The exactly same software driving this artwork was downloadable from Apple's App Store --- thus all visitors or even non-visitors could enjoy the same experiment at home or wherever they like.

Computer-aided design (CAD) system conventionally have been widely used to support designers for creating, modifying, adding something to or removing something from objects by showing simulated objects on computer screen. These virtual, non-physical, objects have been, however, known as imperfect imitation of reality. The impression of shape is highly related to the second order derivative of geometric feature of the shape. Conventional CAD systems, including AutoCAD, usually have visualization feature of the first derivative (normal) and the second derivative (curvature) of given surfaces. There, however, still have been problems in curvature visualization on the screen. First, it lacks true feeling of physical objects. Second, even if designers were given a physical mock-up object in hand, they wouldn't precisely recognize minute change of curvatures — few designers can sense small differences of curvature and most others need a special device to check the curvature. For solving these problem, the authors propose a novel curvature visualization system based on mixed reality technology. The color mapping according to the Gaussian curvature calculated via a time-of-flight camera provides the observers with intuitively understanding the object's curvature information.

This paper presents a novel mixed reality (MR) system for virtually modifying (e.g., denting, engraving, swelling) shape of real objects by using projection of computer-generated shade. Users of this system, which we call HYPERREAL, perceive as if the real object is actually being deformed when they operate the system to modify the shape of the object while only the illumination pattern of the real object is changed. The authors are aiming to apply this technology to product designing field: designers would be able to evaluate and modify form of their product more efficiently and effectively in an intuitive manner using HYPERREAL than conventional design process (typically, computer aided design, or CAD, systems and solid mock-ups) since the system is able to provide users with actuality/presence of real mock-up and flexibility of shape data on a computer system, such as CAD system, all at once.