/ Tsuneyuki Hiramoto / Professor
/ Makoto Ikeda / Professor
/ Lothar M. Schmitt / Associate Professor
/ Jens Herder / Research Associate
Being highly application-oriented, the Computer Industry Laboratory tries to enhance production and engineering processes in industry. A deep understanding of the art of working is required.
Research at the university and in industry has to be integrated to achieve advances for humanity. Standards are required to coordinate industrial development, to provide a basis for further products, and to save financial investment. The Computer Industry Laboratory would like to influence the standardization process in new areas and focus on future needs, rather than on re-establishing existing systems.
Currently, Mr. Herder participates in the Intelligent Dental Care System Project where he manages the design of the user interface. The research of Professor Hiramoto is reliability theory, especially applied to the safety standards of nuclear power plants. Professor Ikeda is doing three kinds of academic projects related to incubation process modeling, electronic commerce, and information navigation systems. He wrote a report about the incubation mechanism of Silicon Valley Area, a book of Netscape Commerce Server for EC, and also a book about Java. Professor Schmitt participates in research on mathematical models for genetic algorithms used for chip placement problems. Furthermore, he participates in research on the modeling of semiconductor devices with computer algebra methods.
With a top-down education approach, students are involved in joint research projects with industry. They learn engineering by doing it, in a context which they find highly motivating.
Current Research Topics:
Refereed Proceeding Papers
Inspired by the cyclical nature of octaves and helical structure of a scale (Shepard, '82 and '83), we prepared a model of a piano-style keyboard (prototyped in Mathematica), which was then geometrically warped into a left-handed helical configuration, one octave/revolution, pitch mapped to height. The natural orientation of upper frequency keys higher on the helix suggests a parsimonious left-handed chirality, so that ascending notes cross in front of a typical listener left->right. Our model is being imported (via the dxf file format) into (Open Inventor/)VRML, where it can be driven by MIDI events, realtime or sequenced, which stream is both synthesized (by a Roland Sound Module), and spatialized by a heterogeneous spatial sound backend (including the Crystal River Engineering Acoustetron II and the Pioneer Sound Field Control speaker-array System), so that the sound of the respective notes is directionalized with respect to sinks, avatars of the human user, by default in the tube of the helix. This is a work-in-progress which we hope to be fully functional within the next few months.
The PSFC, or Pioneer Sound Field Control System, is a DSP-driven hemispherical 14-loudspeaker array, installed at the University of Aizu Multimedia Center. Collocated with a large screen rear-projection stereographic display, the PSFC features realtime control of virtual room characteristics and direction of two separate sound sources, smoothly steering them around a configurable soundscape. The PSFC controls an entire sound field, including sound direction, virtual distance, and simulated environment (reverb level, room size and liveness) for each source. It can also configure a dry (DSP-less) switching matrix for direct directionalization. The PSFC speaker dome is about 14m in diameter, allowing about 20 users at once to comfortably stand or sit near its sweet spot.
In a virtual reality environment, users are immersed in a scene with objects which might produce sound. The responsibility of a vr, environment is to present these objects, but a practical system has only limited resources, including spatialization channels (mixels), midi/audio channels, and processing power. A sound spatialization resource manager controls sound resources and optimizes fidelity (presence) under given conditions. For that, a priority scheme based on psychoacoustics is needed. Parameters for spatialization priorities include intensity calculated from volume and distance, orientation in the case of non-uniform radiation patterns, occluding objects, frequency spectra (low frequencies are harder to localize), expected activity, and others. Objects which are spatially close together (depending on distance and direction) can be mixed. Sources that can not be spatialized separately can be mixed as ambient sources. Important for resource management is the resource assignment, i.e., minimizing swap operations, which makes it desirable to look-ahead and predict upcoming events in a scene. Prediction is achieved by monitoring objects' position, speed, and past evaluation values (i.e., priorities, probabilities, \ldots). Fidelity is contrasted for different kind of resource restrictions and optimal resource assignment. To give standard and comparable results, the VRML 2.0 specification is used as an application programmer interface. Applicability is demonstrated with a helical keyboard, a polyphonic midi stream driven animation including user interaction (a user may move around, playing together with programmed notes). The developed sound spatialization resource manager gives improved spatialization fidelity under runtime constraints. Application programmers and virtual reality scene designers are freed from the burden of assigning mixels and predicting the sound sources locations.
Chapters in Books
CAD/CAM techniques are increasingly used in dentistry for the design and fabrication of teeth restorations. Important concerns are the correction of articulation problems that existed before treatment and the prevention of treatment-generated problems. These require interactive evaluation of the occlusal surfaces of teeth during mastication. Traditional techniques based on the use of casts with mechanical articulators require manual adjustment of occlusal surfaces, which becomes impractical when hard restoration materials like porcelain are used; they are also time and labor consuming and provide little visual information. We present new visual tools and a related user interface for global articulation simulation, developed for the Intelligent Dental Care System project. The aim of the simulation is visual representation of characteristics relevant to the chewing process. The simulation is based on the construction of distance maps, which are visual representations of the distributions of the distances of points in a tooth to the opposite jaw. We use rasterizing graphics hardware for fast calculation of the distance maps. Distance maps are used for collision detection and for the derivation of various characteristics showing the distribution of load on the teeth and the chewing capability of the teeth. Such characteristics can be calculated for particular positions of the jaws; cumulative characteristics are used to describe the properties of jaw movement. This information may be used for interactive design of the occlusal surfaces of restorations and for jaw articulation diagnosis. We also demonstrate elements of a user interface that exploit metaphors familiar to dentists from everyday practice.
Books
Others