In this study, we attempt to enhance emotion in online live music concerts by focusing on the influence of entrainment to the rhythm of music on emotion. We propose a light stick-type device that changes the audience's own light stick swinging motion and their perception of it by adding a force stimulus to the audience's light stick swinging motion. Experimental results suggest that the proposed device promoted the user's light stick swinging behavior and enhanced emotion. Results also suggested that presenting force stimuli in accordance with musical rhythms could be a useful for presenting the presence of other people.

Recently, digital signages are widely utilized to provide information for tourists in plural languages, but it takes longer time to offer information in each language separately. Although simultaneous multilingual display is expected to reduce the time for presentation, there is no guideline for simultaneous multilingual display to keep its legibility. In order to estimate the effect of layout on legibility, the authors prepared contents which have different layout factors and conducted evaluated the legibility of contents with Thurstone’s pairwise comparison. Since the number of combinations in layout factors increases exponentially, the number of stimuli was reduced using an orthogonal table. As a result, significant differences were found in some layout factors and it was found that horizontal arrangement of images and sentences, left alignment in sentences, middle margin from screen edge and medium-sized images made contents more legible.

Pairwise comparison has been widely employed as an easy method for subjective evaluation of several candidates to develop new products or to improve service. In this paper, a method using response time was proposed to improve the accuracy of pairwise comparison. Firstly, a pairwise comparison experiment was conducted to investigate the relationship between response time and difficulty of judgement. Then, a method to improve the accuracy of calculated scales of the objects was proposed where the answer of the pairwise comparison was modified by using the response time and correction function. In this study, three correction functions were compared to find the difference of the accuracy improvement, and two of them showed significant improvement.

As the number of international tourist has been rapidly increasing recently, they have more opportunities to experience different cultures. With the upcoming Olympic game in Tokyo, Japan 2020, digital signage is expected to be utilized for an effective information presentation device for them. This study focuses on the information presentation with four-frame comic for foreign tourists to improve cross-cultural understanding. A subject experiment was conducted to compare four information presentation methods including the four-frame comic from the viewpoint of attractiveness and easy memorization. Participants from various countries watched Japanese food tradition information with four information presentation methods (four-frame comic, photograph, illustration and video) and evaluated their impressions. As a result, it was found that four-frame comic was easy to memorize although its attractiveness was different depending on the participants. However, as the experiment was conducted in a controlled laboratory, it is necessary to conduct a field study using a digital signage in the city to investigate the effective information method.

We use methods from Riemann geometry to investigate transformations between the color spaces of color-normal and color-weak observers. The two main applications are the simulation of the perception of a color weak observer for a color-normal observer, and the compensation of color images in a way that a color-weak observer has approximately the same perception as a color-normal observer. The metrics in the color spaces of interest are characterized with the help of ellipsoids defined by the just-noticeable-differences between the colors which are measured with the help of color-matching experiments. The constructed mappings are the isometries of Riemann spaces that preserve the perceived color differences for both observers. Among the two approaches to build such an isometry, we introduce normal coordinates in Riemann spaces as a tool to construct a global color-weak compensation map. Compared with the previously used methods, this method is free from approximation errors due to local linearizations, and it avoids the problem of shifting locations of the origin of the local coordinate system. We analyze the variations of the Riemann metrics for different observers obtained from new color-matching experiments and describe three variations of the basic method. The performance of the methods is evaluated with the help of semantic differential tests.

Reducing our energy consumption has become an important issue all over the world, and power saving techniques are attracting attention. We propose "HACCS: Home Appliance Control Concierge System" which makes power-saving actions more natural. This system unites the state of home appliances, manual operation buttons, and information used to trigger power saving actions with the web screen of the PC or tablet the user is perusing. This system encourages the user to save electricity by operating home appliances more carefully.

We introduce normal coordinates in Riemann spaces as a tool to construct color-weak compensation methods. We use them to compute color stimuli for a color weak observers that result in the same color perception as the original image presented to a color normal observer in the sense that perceived color-differences are identical for both. The compensation is obtained through a color-difference-preserving map, i.e. an isometry between the 3D color spaces of a color-normal and any given color-weak observer. This approach uses discrimination threshold data and is free from approximation errors due to local linearization. The performance is evaluated with the help of semantic differential (SD) tests.

We investigate several topics related to manifold-techniques for signal processing. On the most general level we consider manifolds with a Riemannian Geometry. These manifolds are characterized by their inner products on the tangent spaces. We describe the connection between the symmetric positive-definite matrices defining these inner products and the Cartan and the Iwasawa decomposition of the general linear matrix groups. This decomposition gives rise to the decomposition of the inner product matrices into diagonal matrices and orthonormal and into diagonal and upper triangular matrices. Next we describe the estimation of the inner product matrices from measured data as an optimization process on the homogeneous space of upper triangular matrices. We show that the decomposition leads to simple forms of partial derivatives that are commonly used in optimization algorithms. Using the group theoretical parametrization ensures also that all intermediate estimates of the inner product matrix are symmetric and positive definite. Finally we apply the method to a problem from psychophysics where the color perception properties of an observer are characterized with the help of color matching experiments. We will show that measurements from color weak observers require the enforcement of the positive-definiteness of the matrix with the help of the manifold optimization technique.