One of the most difficult things in practicing musical instruments is improving timbre. Unlike pitch and rhythm, timbre is a high-dimensional and sensuous concept, and learners cannot evaluate their timbre by themselves. To efficiently improve their timbre control, learners generally need a teacher to provide feedback about timbre. However, hiring teachers is often expensive and sometimes difficult. Our goal is to develop a low-cost learning system that substitutes the teacher. We found that a variational autoencoder (VAE), which is an unsupervised neural network model, provides a 2-dimensional user-friendly mapping of timbre. Our system, SonoSpace, maps the learner's timbre into a 2D latent space extracted from an advanced player's performance. Seeing this 2D latent space, the learner can visually grasp the relative distance between their timbre and that of the advanced player. Although our system was evaluated mainly with an alto saxophone, SonoSpace could also be applied to other instruments, such as trumpets, flutes, and drums.

Bouldering is an urban form of rock climbing that requires precise and complex movement. Similarly to other sports, the simplest way to learn bouldering skill is to mimic professional's motion. However, ordinary beginner boulders cannot learn to coaches, so that they learn by themselves or tutorial videos. Even if they managed, bouldering has a communication difficulty between a trainee and a trainer, that is, climbers cannot mimic the trainer's movement in parallel. Accordingly, we considered a video feedback system would be useful for beginners and suggested InterPoser: a novel visualization system for intermediate motion between a beginner climber and a more experienced. InterPoser receives two videos of different subjects climbing the sample problem and generates an intermediate movement. In addition, this motion is transferred into realistic images of the climber. The proposed system is expected to support beginner to acquire more detailed observation and understanding of the motion.

This paper introduces a telepresence system called OmniGaze, which displays a remote user's presence using a spherical display on an omnidirectional camera. In a telepresence system, gaze has a variety of important functions such as presenting the direction of attention and making simple eye gestures. An omnidirectional camera is an effective tool for gaze communication because it provides a wider range of view for remote users. OmniGaze is a telepresence system which leverages an omnidirectional camera. We designed a modular spherical LED matrix display that covers an omnidirectional camera and projects a spherical animation to visually convey remote user's gaze information. Telecommunication by gaze interaction differs from face-to-face communication in various aspects, so we conducted a user study to investigate practical applications of our system. This paper presents feedback and findings pertaining to the proposed gaze animation technique, advantages and disadvantages of asymmetric communication, and design implications. We also discuss applying our system to communication of humans and automated robots.

This paper introduces Augmented Jump, a backpack multirotor system for jumping ability augmentation. Augmented Jump hovers and supports users' weight by a constant upward power of thrust. Users can jump higher and stay in the air for a longer time than usual with Augmented Jump. We designed and developed our first proof-of-concept prototype that can be controlled as an octocopter and support user's weight by 50kg at maximum. In our experiments, it is found that the system enabled the user to perform jumping in simulated 75% reduced gravity. From user study, the results showed that our system was effective for extending the height and the duration of jumping.