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.

In this paper, we tackle the problem to achieve k-coverage of a target indoor space with obstacles, that is, any point in the target monitoring area has a line-of-sight to and is located in the sensing range rsof at least k sensors. We propose heuristic algorithms for computing a deployment pattern achieving the k-coverage in an arbitrary 3D target space with stationary and mobile obstacles, while minimizing the overall deployment cost. For the case with only stationary obstacles, we propose a greedy algorithm that puts sensor nodes one by one on a grid point of the deployable area in the descending order of the cost-performance value (i.e., how many monitoring points are covered by putting a sensor at the deployment point per unit deployment cost). In order to extend the algorithm for the case with a mobile obstacle, we define mobile k-coverage that guarantees k-coverage of a target space for arbitrary position of a mobile obstacle, then provide a sufficient condition for the mobile k-coverage: the half-sphere of radius rscentered at a monitoring point bounded by the vertical plane containing the point includes at least k sensor nodes. Based on this condition, we propose a heuristic algorithm that puts at least one sensor node in each π over k+1 spherical wedge for each monitoring point. With the proposed algorithms, we have computed the sensor nodes position in an existing indoor environment and confirmed that the obtained WSN deployment in the real space accurately achieves k-coverage.

In this paper, we propose a framework named ``UbiREMOTE'' for controlling information appliances connected to a home network with a unified and intuitive user interface from a remote place.The UbiREMOTE framework provides users with a way to control appliances in a home through a virtual space drawn on a mobile terminal screen which reflects the latest conditions of the real appliances and the rooms in the home. With UbiREMOTE, a user controls appliances by (1) moving to the front of an appliance, (2) choosing the appliance to control and (3) pushing buttons on the virtual remote controller which imitates the real remote controller for the appliance or the real console.In this paper, we propose a method to improve the drawing speed of 3D virtual space on mobile terminals and a method for automatically reflecting condition changes of the real space in the virtual space.We implemented the methods and evaluated the performance. The results showed that the proposed methods can be practically used on small mobile terminals.

We have proposed FAIRVIEW, a framework for realizing 3D graphics-based interaction between mobile users in real world and remote network users. In order to realize FAIRVIEW in an ordinary wireless LAN and Internet environment, a QoS adaptation mechanism is essential. The QoS adaptation mechanism of FAIRVIEW regulates, for each user, update frequency of his/her observable objects depending on the importance values associated with regions of his/her sight within available bandwidth. In this demonstration, we show how our QoS adaptation mechanism changes the quality of each observable object as the user moves his/her sight.

We describe the implementation of a vision algorithm based on matched filtering on an FPGA. Detection of a reference image in an input image must be performed in real-time and robustly against occlusion and change of illumination. Vision algorithm based on matched filtering can perform the detection robustly but requires much computation time since it includes 2D FFT/IFFT and polar transform. In this article, we implement the algorithm on an FPGA so that the detection is performed in real-time and robustly.

A new approach to the detection of the position and the orientation of planar motion objects based on one-sided Radon transform is presented. Detection of position and orientation of planar motion objects is a key to advanced object handling. First, one-sided Radon transform is introduced and its properties are investigated. Next, algorithms to detect planar motion of objects are constructed based on the properties of one-sided Radon transform. The algorithms are then implemented on a computer and are evaluated experimentally.

This paper describes real time object tracking by extracting optical flows from a sequence of images. Optical flows are calculated based on the generalized gradient model. Our method detects a moving object, and tracks it from the optical flow data. Assuming that pixels corresponding to the same object have similar flow vectors, we extract a connected region with similar flow vectors. We apply this method to multiple object tracking. When two objects overlap, foreground object is recognized, and each object is tracked without confusion. Optical flow extraction and object tracking are executed in realtime by a special image processor.