This paper presents a multi-modal presentation markup language for humanoid robots, MPML-HR ver. 3.0, which is able to describe presentation contents including speech-based interactions with audiences. Previous versions of MPML-HR do not feature any interaction functionality which dynamically changes the presentation according to the utterances by audiences, although such interaction makes the presentation more effective and understandable. Since MPML-HR ver. 3.0 inherits simple descriptions of previous versions of MPML-HR, the content designer can describe interactive presentations without configuring conventional complicated multi-modal interactive systems.

Both on-screen agents and humanoid robots are increasingly used as human-computer interfaces. This study evaluates an on-screen agent and a humanoid robot in the task of one-sided presentations. We compared the participant's subjective impressions of nearly identical presentation contents performed by each presenter. The results derived by the semantic differential (SD) method and the direct questioning show that each presenter has different functional advantages. We infer that on-screen agent and robot can complement each other in presentations

GeneView is a newly developed human gene mapping library system that works on an X-Window platform. This system is designed for researchers who routinely utilize gene mapping data in the laboratory but are unfamiliar with computer technology. GeneView offers various features, including friendly user interface, fast operation and visualization facility. Genetic loci are displayed graphically with an idiogram. This system can be operated in multiple languages. A current version supports Japanese and English, and can be easily expanded to include other languages. A prototype of GeneView is now installed on a SPARC (Sun4) workstation. Because of the X-Window platform, GeneView should be compatible with various types of workstations.

A 3-D vision system incorporating a solid modeler and a geometric reasoning mechanism is described. A mathematical method based on the perspective geometry is employed to determine the position of predefined shapes in 3-D space from a single-view image. The solid modeler allows the precise and reliable understanding of possible objects. Furthermore, it can be used to synthesize virtual images based on the understanding result. The synthesized image from the solid modeler is effectively utilized to verify the hypothesis computed from the edge information extracted from the observed image. To lessen the inefficiency of using the mathematical geometric method in the whole understanding process, a plane recognition process is introduced at an intermediate stage.>