Children naturally transform everyday objects into play equipment, but studying these spontaneous interactions using real products poses significant safety and analytical challenges. As a new methodology of environmental design and interaction science, this paper proposes the "Playfication" framework to quantitatively model and predict how children interact with environments based on pure 3D geometry and physical scale. First, Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is applied to a large-scale 3D dataset on everyday objects to extract fundamental geometric patterns ("Basis Shapes"). The authors fabricated these shapes as safe, soft blocks and conducted a free-play observational study with 31 children to capture interaction distributions. By integrating 3D point clouds and absolute scale data, a PointNet++ model was trained to predict interaction probabilities (e.g., "sit," "stand," "crawl"). An evaluation using unseen commercial furniture demonstrated the model's accuracy in predicting physical affordances. This approach serves as an exploratory proof-of-concept for understanding child-object interactions and designing safer, more engaging environments.

In recent years, smart buildings have garnered attention for their ability to integrate various systems and devices within a building, allowing for centralized data platform-based control to achieve purposes such as energy management. Smart building data platforms are required to provide vendor-agnostic APIs (for device control and data acquisition) and simplify device addition and operation. In this paper, we design a platform architecture that fulfills those requirements. The differing IoT gateway functionalities for each device are dynamically deployed to the IoT gateway. The devices are abstracted into metrics, which are a type of data, and the API is called with the metric and the building structure in which the device is located. Furthermore, we propose a method to standardize metric names of the same type across the platform. The designed platform is implemented and verified.

In this study, we propose a method of noncontact elastography, which allows us to investigate stiffness of soft structures by combining optical and acoustic modalities. We use optical coherence tomography (OCT) as a means of detecting internal deformation of a sample appearing in response to a mechanical force applied by acoustic radiation pressure. Unlike most of other stiffness sensing, this method can be performed without any contacts between the sample and actuator that generates pressure. To demonstrate the method, we measure the vibration velocity of a uniform phantom made of polyurethane, and characterize the mechanical parameters. We then confirm that the measured and calculated attenuation of the vibration over the depth agree well, which is inaccessible with a conventional laser Doppler vibrometer. This result paves a way to characterize more complex internal structures of soft materials.

Urushi (Japanese lacquer) is a natural resin paint with electrical insulating capability. We focused on Japanese patterns on an urushi-ware that is a product coated urushi. To make urushi-wares interactive without losing elegance and beauty, we transformed Japanese patterns into near-field communication (NFC) antenna patterns. We developed three types of prototype antennas and confirmed their functionality. In addition, we developed an IC key tag and an interactive lunch box as example applications of interactive urushi-wares.

In this paper, we propose the development of an underwater virtual reality (VR) system for scuba training. The aim is to enable scuba students to experience an arbitrary underwater environment and enable training using VR technology in limited water environments such as a pool or shallow water. Using this system, scuba training, which can currently only be done by hands-on training, can be reproduced through a VR experience in a pool. This system consists of a cable-connected PC-HMD (UWHMD: Underwater Wired Head Mounted Display) that can be used underwater and a motion capture system. According to the pilot test, it was confirmed that position tracking was successful at widths of about 2.25 m, lengths of about 3.0 m, and depths of about 1.3m.

Urushi (Japanese lacquer) is a natural resin paint with electrical insulating capability. By using it as a base material and coating material for electronic circuits, it is possible to construct a circuit with an elegant appearance and feel. It is also possible to build a multilayered electronic circuit by using urushi as insulation layers. In this study, we investigate techniques to construct touch interfaces using a multilayered electronic circuit (urushi circuit). At first, we fabricated an urushi circuit with a touch electrode consisting of two layers. To improve its appearance, we fabricated urushi circuits in which all touch electrodes are arranged on the top layer and all wires are hidden in the bottom layer. Moreover, as an extension of the touch interface, we built a grid of touch electrodes that realizes two-dimensional touch sensing.

We propose design methods that process the surface of Urushi, a Japanese traditional coating material, with computer technology and ultraviolet (UV) light control. Urushi changes their physical condition by absorbing UV light energy. Our research introduces design method with this physical feature for Personal Fabrication by utilizing UV laser and galvanometer mirror or UV lamp and paper.

This paper proposes a simple 1 DOF rotational haptic display that achieves endless sharpening of a pencil. Many haptic applications have been proposed to present shapes, elasticity, viscosity, and other physical properties of the environment. While these are important to support many tasks such as teleoperation and computer aided design, we focus on the use of haptic display for amusement. We paid special attention to the feeling of ldquoaddictive comfortablenessrdquo induced by haptic stimulation. We take ldquopencil sharpenerrdquo as a typical example, because it is obviously comfortable and has addictiveness. Moreover, the mechanism is relatively simple because the sensation could be generated through 1 DOF haptic display. In this paper, we recorded force and sound of the real pencil sharpener and replayed the sharpening sensation through a haptic display.

When a head is equipped with a hanger made of wire sideways, and its temporal region is sandwiched by the hanger, the head rotates unexpectedly. We named the phenomenon ldquoHanger Reflexrdquo, and we have studied this phenomenon to understand its mechanism and to show the possibility of utilizing the phenomenon as a human interface. However, to use it as an interface, pain sensation induced by the hanger becomes a practical problem. In this paper, we determined the necessary conditions of the Hanger Reflex, and we developed an interface that can induce head rotation by using the Hanger Reflex, without giving pain to the user.

In this paper, we present a high speed optical motion capture method that can measure three dimensional motion, orientation, and incident illumination at tagged points in a scene. We use tracking tags that work in natural lighting conditions and can be imperceptibly embedded in attire or other objects. Our system supports an unlimited number of tags in a scene, with each tag uniquely identified to eliminate marker reacquisition issues. Our tags also provide incident illumination data which can be used to match scene lighting when inserting synthetic elements. The technique is therefore ideal for on-set motion capture or real-time broadcasting of virtual sets. Unlike previous methods that employ high speed cameras or scanning lasers, we capture the scene appearance using the simplest possible optical devices - a light-emitting diode (LED) with a passive binary mask used as the transmitter and a photosensor used as the receiver. We strategically place a set of optical transmitters to spatio-temporally encode the volume of interest. Photosensors attached to scene points demultiplex the coded optical signals from multiple transmitters, allowing us to compute not only receiver location and orientation but also their incident illumination and the reflectance of the surfaces to which the photosensors are attached. We use our untethered tag system, called Prakash, to demonstrate methods of adding special effects to captured videos that cannot be accomplished using pure vision techniques that rely on camera images.