What we wear (our clothes and wearable accessories) can represent our mood at the moment. We developed Emolleia to explore how to make aesthetic wears more expressive to become a novel form of non-verbal communication to express our emotional feelings. Emolleia is an open wearable kinetic display in form of three 3D printed flowers that can dynamically open and close at different speeds. With our open-source platform, users can define their own animated motions. In this paper, we described the prototype design, hardware considerations, and user surveys (n=50) to evaluate the expressiveness of 8 pre-defined animated motions of Emolleia. Our initial results showed animated motions are feasible to communicate different emotional feelings especially at the valence and arousal dimensions. Based on the findings, we mapped eight pre-defined animated motions to the reported, user-perceived valence, arousal and dominance and discussed possible directions for future work.

The tactile and kinesthetic sensation of pushing a button is usually lost when interacting with modern devices like touchscreens and/or virtual reality platforms. We present FingerFlex, a standalone glove wearable actuating the metacarpophalangeal joint (MCP) of each finger via shape memory alloy (SMA). SMA actuation is subtle, silent, and light, making it ideal for actuation of the fingers which we use to simulate the sensation of pressing a button.

Video magnification methods can magnify and reveal subtle changes invisible to the naked eye. However, in such subtle changes, meaningful ones caused by physical and natural phenomena are mixed with non-meaningful ones caused by photographic noise. Therefore, current methods often produce noisy and misleading magnification outputs due to the non-meaningful subtle changes. For detecting only meaningful subtle changes, several methods have been proposed but require human manipulations, additional resources, or input video scene limitations. In this paper, we present a novel method using fractional anisotropy (FA) to detect only meaningful subtle changes without the aforementioned requirements. FA has been used in neuroscience to evaluate anisotropic diffusion of water molecules in the body. On the basis of our observation that temporal distribution of meaningful subtle changes more clearly indicates anisotropic diffusion than that of non-meaningful ones, we used FA to design a fractional anisotropic filter that passes only meaningful subtle changes. Using the filter enables our method to obtain better and more impressive magnification results than those obtained with state-of-the-art methods.

A new full parallax light field 3D display that optically interpolates the rays emitted is proposed. Using a barrier with special aperture structure, we achieve interpolation by optical linear blending not only for the horizontal direction, but also for the vertical direction. Linear blending produces visually equivalent intermediate view point images equivalent to the real views if the disparity between the two images being blended are small enough. Therefore, a high feel of existence can be produced as the interpolation yields smooth motion parallax. Since interpolation reduces the number of viewpoints, number of pixels in each direction can be increased yielding high resolution. In this demonstration, we reproduce CG objects and scenes of a ball game on a table top.

Video magnification reveals subtle changes invisible to the naked eye, but such tiny yet meaningful changes are often hidden under large motions: small deformation of the muscles in doing sports, or tiny vibrations of strings in ukulele playing. For magnifying subtle changes under large motions, video acceleration magnification method has recently been proposed. This method magnifies subtle acceleration changes and ignores slow large motions. However, quick large motions severely distort this method. In this paper, we present a novel use of jerk to make the acceleration method robust to quick large motions. Jerk has been used to assess smoothness of time series data in the neuroscience and mechanical engineering fields. On the basis of our observation that subtle changes are smoother than quick large motions at temporal scale, we used jerk-based smoothness to design a jerk-aware filter that passes subtle changes only under quick large motions. By applying our filter to the acceleration method, we obtain impressive magnification results better than those obtained with state-of-the-art.

Navigation and mobility mechanics for virtual environments aim to be realistic or fun, but rarely prioritize the accuracy of movement. We propose PinchMove, a highly accurate navigation mechanic utilizing pinch gestures and manipulation of the viewport for confined environments that prefers accurate movement. We ran a pilot study to first determine the degree of simulator sickness caused by this mechanic, and a comprehensive user study to evaluate its accuracy in a virtual environment. We found that utilizing an 80° tunneling effect at a maximum speed of 15.18° per second was deemed suitable for PinchMove in reducing motion sickness. We also found our system to be at average, more accurate in enclosed virtual environments when compared to conventional methods. This paper makes the following three contributions: 1) We propose a navigation solution in near-field virtual environments for accurate movement, 2) we determined the appropriate tunneling effect for our method to minimize motion sickness, and 3) We validated our proposed solution by comparing it with conventional navigation solutions in terms of accuracy of movement. We also propose several use- case scenarios where accuracy in movement is desirable and further discuss the effectiveness of PinchMove.

We propose a system that allows multiple groups of users at remote locations to naturally share a 3D image of real objects. All users can interactively observe a 3D stereoscopic image without distortion from their own viewpoints. The system basically consists of a combination of systems: imaging and display. The imaging system captures the real object's images from certain number of viewpoints which are used to generate stereoscopic images from arbitrary viewpoints based on an image-based rendering technique implemented on GPU. The display system interactively generates a 3D virtual image of the real object based on the IllusionHole technique. Users at one place just put the real object on their imaging system to capture a set of its images from sparse viewpoints around it; other groups of multiple users at remote places connected by networks observe its virtual image from arbitrary viewpoints on their display systems.

We propose a system that allows multiple groups of users at remote locations to naturally share a 3D image of real objects. All users can interactively observe a 3D stereoscopic image without distortion from their own viewpoints. The system basically consists of a combination of subsystems: imaging and display. The imaging subsystem generates images of the real object observed from arbitrary viewpoints based on image-based rendering technique implemented on GPU. The display system generates a 3D virtual image of the real object to be interactively observed by multiple people around the tabletop display. People at one place just put the real object on their imaging system to capture a set of its images from sparse viewpoints around it; other groups of multiple persons at remote places connected by networks observe its virtual image from arbitrary viewpoints, as if there is a copy of the real object, on their display systems. This paper describes details of the system configurations and algorithms. Then discussions are made based on experimental results.

A real-time MVC viewer for free-viewpoint navigation is demonstrated. MVC, a video coding standard for multi-view video, is an extension of the state-of-the-art H.264/AVC. Realizing parallel decoding and view synthesis is essential to develop real-time viewers. A new decoder architecture is introduced for the proposed viewer. In addition, a file format for MVC is introduced. View synthesis is performed entirely within GPU. It is demonstrated that the MVC viewer can decode a MVC bitstream and generate a virtual camera image in real-time.

This paper presents a formulation of the optical-drop wavelength assignment problem (ODWAP) and its heuristic algorithm for WDM ring networks. The wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) technology has been popular in communication societies for providing very large communication bands by multiple lightpaths with different wavelengths on a single optical fiber. Particularly, a double-ring optical network architecture based on the packet-over-WDM technology such as the HORNET architecture has been studied as a next generation platform for metropolitan area networks (MANs). Each node in this architecture is equipped with a wavelength-fixed optical-drop and a tunable transmitter so that a lightpath can be established between any pair of nodes without wavelength conversions. In this paper, we formulate ODWAP for efficient wavelength reuse under heterogeneous traffic in this network. Then, we propose a simple heuristic algorithm for ODWAP. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing waiting times for packet transmissions when a small number of wavelengths are available to retain the network cost for MANs.