/ 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 Journal Papers
The PSFC, or Pioneer Sound Field Controller, is a DSP-driven hemispherical loudspeaker array, installed at the University of Aizu Multimedia Center. The PSFC features realtime manipulation of the primary components of sound spatialization for each of two audio sources located in a virtual environment, including the content (apparent direction and distance) and context (room characteristics: reverberation level, room size and liveness). In an alternate mode, it can also direct the destination of the two separate input signals across 14 loudspeakers, manipulating the direction of the virtual sound sources with no control over apparent distance other than that afforded by source loudness (including no simulated environmental reflections or reverberation). The PSFC speaker dome is about 10~m in diameter, accommodating about fifty simultaneous users, including about twenty users comfortably standing or sitting near its ``sweet spot,'' the area in which the illusions of sound spatialization are most vivid. Collocated with a large screen rear-projection stereographic display, the PSFC is intended for advanced multimedia and Virtual Reality applications.
Refereed Proceeding Papers
Broader use of virtual reality environments and sophisticated animations spawn a need for spatial sound. Until now, spatial sound design has been based very much on experience and trial and error. Most effects are hand-crafted, because good design tools for spatial sound do not exist. This paper discusses spatial sound authoring and its applications, including shared virtual reality environments based on VRML. New utilities introduced by this research are an inspector for sound sources, an interactive resource manager, and a visual soundscape manipulator. The tools are part of a sound spatialization framework and allow a designer/author of multimedia content to monitor and debug sound events. Resource constraints like limited sound spatialization channels can also be simulated.
In an information-rich Virtual Reality (VR) environment, the user is immersed in a world containing many objects providing that information. Given the finite computational resources of any computer system, optimization is required to ensure that the most important information is presented to the user as clearly as possible and in a timely fashion. In particular, what is desired are means whereby the perspicuity of an object may be enhanced when appropriate. An object becomes more perspicuous when the information it provides to the user becomes more readily apparent. Additionally, if a particular object provides high-priority information, it would be advantageous to make that object obtrusive as well as highly perspicuous. An object becomes more obtrusive if it draws attention to itself (or equivalently, if it is hard to ignore). This paper describes a technique whereby objects may dynamically adapt their representation in a user's environment according to a dynamic priority evaluation of the information each object provides. The three components of our approach are: - an information manager that evaluates object information priority, - an enhancement manager that tabulates rendering features associated with increasing object perspicuity and obtrusion as a function of priority, and - a resource manager that assigns available object rendering resources according to features indicated by the enhancement manager for the priority set for each object by the information manager. We consider resources like visual space (pixels), sound spatialization channels (mixels), MIDI/audio channels, and processing power, and discuss our approach applied to different applications. Assigned object rendering features are implemented locally at the object level (e.g., object facing the user using the billboard node in VRML 2.0) or globally, using helper applications (e.g., active spotlights, semi-automatic cameras).
The cycle of abstraction-reconstruction which occurs as a fundamental principle in the development of culture and in cognitive processes is described and analyzed. This approach leads to recognition of boundary conditions for and directions of probable development of cognitive tools. It is shown how the transition from a conventional Japanese-English character dictionary to a multi-dimensional language database is an instance of such an abstraction-reconstruction cycle. The different phases of the design of a multi-dimensional language database based upon different computer software technologies are properly placed in this cycle. The methods used include the use of UNIX software tools, classical database methods as-well-as the use of search engines based upon full text search in this process. Several directions of application and extension for a multi-dimensional language database are discussed from the general point of view of an abstraction-reconstruction cycle.