We propose a gaze-guiding method called MOSion to adjust the guiding strength reacted to observers’ motion based on a high-speed projector and the afterimage effect in the human vision system. Our method decomposes the target area into mosaic patterns to embed visual cues in the perceived images. The patterns can only direct the attention of the moving observers to the target area. The stopping observer can see the original image with little distortion because of light integration in the visual perception. The precomputation of the patterns provides the adaptive guiding effect without tracking devices and computational costs depending on the movements. The evaluation and the user study show that the mosaic decomposition enhances the perceived saliency with a few visual artifacts, especially in moving conditions. Our method embedded in white lights works in various situations such as planar posters, advertisements, and curved objects.

Abstract Differentiable rendering (DR) enables various computer graphics and computer vision applications through gradient‐based optimization with derivatives of the rendering equation. Most rasterization‐based approaches are built on general‐purpose automatic differentiation (AD) libraries and DR‐specific modules handcrafted using CUDA. Such a system design mixes DR algorithm implementation and algorithm building blocks, resulting in hardware dependency and limited performance. In this paper, we present a practical hardware‐agnostic differentiable renderer called Dressi, which is based on a new full AD design. The DR algorithms of Dressi are fully written in our Vulkan‐based AD for DR, Dressi‐AD, which supports all primitive operations for DR. Dressi‐AD and our inverse UV technique inside it bring hardware independence and acceleration by graphics hardware. Stage packing, our runtime optimization technique, can adapt hardware constraints and efficiently execute complex computational graphs of DR with reactive cache considering the render pass hierarchy of Vulkan. HardSoftRas, our novel rendering process, is designed for inverse rendering with a graphics pipeline. Under the limited functionalities of the graphics pipeline, HardSoftRas can propagate the gradients of pixels from the screen space to far‐range triangle attributes. Our experiments and applications demonstrate that Dressi establishes hardware independence, high‐quality and robust optimization with fast speed, and photorealistic rendering.

A head-mounted display (HMD), which is common in virtual reality (VR) systems, normally hides the user's face. This feature prohibits to realize a face-to-face communication, in which two or more users share the same virtual space, or show a participant's face on a surrogate-robot's face when the user remotely connects to the robot through an HMD for tele-immersion. Considering that face-to-face communication is one of the fundamental requirements of real-time communications, and is widely realized and used by many nonVR telecommunication systems, an HMD's face hiding feature is considered to be a serious problem and limits the possibility of VR. To address this issue, we propose the notion of "Face-through HMD" and present a face-capturing HMD configuration called "Behind-the-Mask" with infrared (IR) cut filters and side cameras that can be attached to existing HMDs. As an IR cut filter only reflects infrared light and transmits visible light, it is transparent to the user's eye but reflects the user's face with infrared lights. By merging a prescanned 3D face model of the user with the face image obtained from our HMD, the 3D face model of the user with eyes and mouth movement can be reconstructed. We consider that our proposed HMD can be used in many VR applications.

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in Fluidized Bed Interface. It can give us the haptic feedback of sand and fluid reversibly, but exhibits difficulty in visually changes. So, we proposed a novel spatial augmented reality technique to provide the visual liquidness impression. Our system gives visual feedback to users by projecting liquid images on the surface of the interface. The image is generated on the basis of human visual cognition and is different from a mere fluid simulation. As the result, the visual liquidness of our system was emphasized compared to the Fluidized Bed Interface. In addition, the effect of emphasizing visual liquidness is confirmed in the fluidized bed phenomenon, and it is found out that our system is superior in displaying a liquid image. Our system is expected not only to be applied in entertainments but also to contribute to the elucidation of human liquid cognitive mechanisms.

It is useful to employ electronic medical records to improve medical studies. Based on their experience, medical workers conventionally prepare clinical pathways as guidelines for the typical flow for the medical treatment of each disease. In this study, we propose an approach for verifying existing clinical pathways and recommend variants or new pathways by analyzing historical records. We propose a method based on the application of sequential pattern mining to record logs with handling time intervals between treatments. We also focus on the efficacy of medicines instead of their names because various medicines have the same efficacy and they change dynamically. We evaluated the proposed method using actual logs and the results demonstrated that the proposed method is effective.