Daisuke Uriu

Media cushion: soft interface to control living environment using human natural behavior

The ubiquitous era [Weiser 1995] has begun to unfold. Through sensors and actuators connected with the physical world, the computers support our daily life by sensing our behavior. However, most interfaces around us still remain in hard touch points and the old direct manipulations such as switches and buttons. This makes it difficult to give fully appropriate and flexible services to the user according to his/her situation. We propose Media Cushion as a new soft interface for the ubiquitous era, which enables us to control the living environment more naturally and adequately by taking in human body movements.

Where buddhism encounters entertainment computing

This special panel session provides an opportunity to discuss how entertainment computing designers create interactive media/ contents on Buddhism and also other religious practices. In this year, we have launched an exciting project designing interactive contents to be used in Todaiji temple, one of the world heritages located in Nara, Japan. In this project, we are actually collaborating with monks of the Todaiji temple, learning Buddhist rituals in this temple from the monks, and creating Augmented Reality contents working on high performance network infrastructure. This session consists of a presentation introducing our Todaiji temple project and a set of short key notes from specialists; researchers on Augmented Reality, Entertainment Computing, and Anthropology.

MASTABA: the household shrine in the future archived digital pictures

These phenomenons show that the meaning of a grave in Japan is changing. The traditional Japanese graves have been eternal places where ancestors sleep. Some modern Japanese graves are the things or places for their family and posterity to remember and hand down the memory of ancestors. These show, today, that many Japanese people think that archiving dead’s memories is more important than the place where dead lies itself. And we think that these modern graves should be called ”family shrines”.

Moo-pong

Moo-pong is a tool to make original ”piece” which consists of one’s experiences (moving images) for someone and experience the ”piece”. Moo-pong devices enable to pick up moving images from one’s environment, gather them, and appreciate them as a kaleidoscope. A camera links the captured images with physical IDs. The IDs are gathered in a container, which generates a movie relating to the IDs, to be appreciated as a living experience.

PHOROL: interactive wall clock art of online shared snapshots

Photographic technology that appeared in the early 19th century has been integrated into many aspects of our lives with many technical innovations such as snapshots of 35 mm films, digital photography and snapshots, and online photo sharing service. As a result, today many people can enjoy expressiveness of photography compared to the fact that only limited people were allowed to use photography when it was emerged.