This study aims to investigate the effects of kinetic typography elements in single-button messengers to enrich the conveyance of emotional quality. Two complementary studies were conducted: First, a paired user workshop was conducted through which eight macro animation types were extracted to facilitate the evaluation in a subsequent experiment. Second, an empirical study was conducted to explore the effects of kinetic typographical elements, namely animation type, speed, and dynamics, on conveying particular emotions. The study is expected to act as a good stepping stone for further developing single-button messengers as an alternative messaging tool with unique communicational aspects.

A virtual touch screen concept using an optical see-through head-mounted display has been suggested. With a virtual touch screen, the user's direct-touch interactions are allowed in much the same way as a conventional touch screen, but the absence of haptic feedback and physical constraint leads to poor user performance. To overcome this issue, we developed a wearable haptic device, called HapThimble. It provides various types of haptic feedback (tactile, pseudo-force, and vibrotactile) to the user's fingertip and mimics physical buttons based on force-penetration depth curves. We conducted three experiments with HapThimble. The first experiment confirmed that HapThimble could increase a users' performance when conducting clicking and dragging tasks. The second experiment revealed that users could differentiate between six types of haptic feedback, rendered based on different force-penetration depth curves obtained using HapThimble. Last, we conducted a test to investigate the similarity between the physical buttons and the mimicked haptic buttons and obtained a 90.3% success rate.

The Nyström method has been one of the most effective techniques for kernel-based approach that scales well to large data sets. Since its introduction, there has been a large body of work that improves the approximation accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel Nyström method that improves both accuracy and efficiency based on a new theoretical analysis. We first provide a generalized sampling scheme, CAPS, that minimizes a novel error bound based on the subspace distance. We then present our double Nyström method that reduces the size of the decomposition in two stages. We show that our method is highly efficient and accurate compared to other state-of-the-art Nyström methods by evaluating them on a number of real data sets.

A vision-based method for positioning and orienting of pallets is presented in this paper, which uses a single camera mounted on the fork carriage of an autonomous forklift. The orientation of a standard pallet without any fiducial marks is first determined by using a back-projection technique that projects the upper and the lower lines of the pallet front plane in input image backward onto a virtual plane with arbitrary orientation in 3D space. When the back-projected lines are parallel, the orient of the virtual plane is the same as that of the pallet front plane. The position of the pallet is then determined by using the height information of the standard pallet. Through a test on a set of real pallet images, we found that the proposed method was applicable to pallet engagement in real environment practically.

The color inverse halftoning technique was developed for the use of scanned color halftone images in digital applications, which is basically a smoothing method of halftone patterns. Smoothing of the moire phenomenon in color halftoning unfortunately leads to excessive blurring of the boundaries because moire patterns form very low-frequency peaks in the spectral domain. An adaptive method for smoothing the moire patterns in image space is proposed in this paper, which uses moire strength information that is determined off-line by analyzing interference between different color halftone patterns. The information is stored in tables and is looked up directly with color values of each pixel, so the proposed method works very fast. Through several experiments, we found that our experimental method smoothed moire patterns well without blurring the boundaries much.