A table-top reflective aerial imaging system can display digital information as if it existed on a specular horizontal surface, such as a marble or acrylic table-top. This system allows a user sitting in a chair to naturally look down at an aerial image displayed on a table, thus integrating the aerial image into daily life. However, although it displays an aerial image on a specular surface, it does not reproduce the reflected image, thus failing to achieve optical consistency. To improve the presence of aerial images, we propose a new table-top reflective aerial imaging system that not only displays aerial images on a specular surface but also reproduces the reflected images in that surface. The proposed system consists of an aerial imaging optical system that can display independent aerial images on and in a specular surface, and a reflected image reproduction method that designs the luminance of the aerial image inside the specular surface according to the actual measured material reflectance. We implemented a prototype to verify the principle of aerial imaging optics and evaluated the naturalness of the reflected image reproduced by our method through user experimentation. The results show that the difference between the material of the specular surface and the shape of the aerial image affects whether the reflected image produced by the proposed method is perceived as natural or not.

"Mirroring" refers to the unconscious mimicry of another person's behaviors, such as their facial expressions. Mirroring has many positive effects, such as enhancing closeness and improving the flow of a conversation, which enriches the quality of communication. Our study set out to devise a means of evoking these positive effects in a video chat without any conscious effort of participants. We constructed a videophone system, called FaceShare, which can deform the user's face into a smile in response to their partner's smiling. That is, our system generates mirroring by producing a pseudo-smile through image processing. We conducted an experiment in which pairs of participants had brief conversations via FaceShare. The results implied that mirroring using the pseudo-smile lets the mimicker, whose face is deformed according to the expressions of their partner, feel a closeness, and improves the flow of the conversation for both the mimicker and the mimickee, who sees the mimicker's deformed face.

To effectively utilize gaze in one-to-many communication, robots must direct and avert their gaze with appropriate timing. However, few studies have focused on this aspect of communication because of the difficulty in detecting the position of many gaze recipients and directing appropriate gazes to each. This paper proposes a system of robotic eyes that can send averted or direct gazes simultaneously to multiple recipients by switching between convex and hollow eye shapes, which we call Transgazer.

Information needs expressed by using the same query for a search engine might be totally different, whether on week days or weekends, or during the day or at night. For queries having no temporal changes in search intentions, the same search results ranking may be returned regardless of the time, but for those with temporal changes the ranking must be suitably altered depending on the time of input. To achieve time-dependent search results rankings, we focus on the temporal changes in the search intentions. We present the results obtained by analyzing a commercial search engine log and propose a method of detecting queries showing periodic changes in the search intentions.