Member(s): Yi-Ching Kang and Hiroki NISHINO

‘Scented Graphics’ is our artistic experiments with a scented-printing technique that utilizes an ink-jet printer.By mixing water-soluble aroma oils with inks, an ink-jet printer can be utilized to control scent-mixing with high-precision almost at no extra cost. Such features are hardly provided by existing scented-printing services at the same level of flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

We mimic the Swiss Graphic Design in our experiment as the style facilitate the preliminary investigation of this technique. As scent-mixing is a fundamental technique in olfactory art, our experiments can be beneficial as design exemplars as a preliminary exploration of the technique.

Member(s): Hiroki Nishino.

Computer music systems normally implement a unit-gen- erator graph as a network of unit generators, through which audio vectors are streamed and processed.

This paper proposes an alternative implementation technique for unit- generator-based sound synthesis, which views a unit-generator graph as a generator of audio-vector trees to be lazily evaluated. The simplest implementation of this technique allows to process sound synthesis and sound-control tasks in different threads even in a synchronous computer music system, making real-time sound synthesis more stable by amortizing the time costs for sound-control tasks over DSP cycles, while maintaining the low roundtrip latency between the audio input and processed output at the same time.

We also extend the discussion to the possible extensions of our technique for parallelization, distribution, and speculation in real-time sound synthesis. The investi- gation into such a novel implementation technique would benefit further research on high-performance real-time sound synthesis.

Member(s): Ting-Wen Chin, Yu-Yen Chuang, Yu-Ling Fan, Ye-Ning Jiang, Yi-Ching Kang, Wei-Hsin Kuo, Tzu-Wen To, and Hiroki Nishino.

We prototyped interactive digital signage systems with custom- made physical interfaces to investigate how the addition of physical interfaces extends the design space of digital signage. While our investigation is still in the preliminary phase and the prototypes just simply play back video files when triggered by the user’s action, this addition of physical interfaces seems to provide an interesting design space; the addition not only can be helpful for an intuitive interaction but also beneficial as a means of creative expressions for better message delivery.

Member(s):  Hiroki Nishino.

We propose a novel implementation technique, speculative digital sound synthesis, as a practical solution for the tradeoff between computational efficiency and sample-rate accurate control in sound synthesis. Our technique first optimistically assumes that there will be no change to the control parameters for sound synthesis and computes by audio vectors at the beginning of a DSP cycle. Then, after the speculation, when any change is made in the same cycle, it recomputes only the neces- sary amount of the output.

As changes to control parameters are normally quite sporadic in most situations, recomputation is rarely performed. Hence, the computational efficiency can be maintained mostly equivalent to the computation by au- dio vectors without any speculation, when no changed is made to the control parameters. Even when any change is made, the overhead can be reduced since the recomputation is only applied to those sound objects that had their control parameters updated, and the output samples in the past are not recomputed.

Thus, our speculative digital sound synthesis technique can provide both sample-rate accurate control in sound synthesis and better performance efficiency by the audio vectors in most practical situations. The tradeoff between these two issues has been a long-standing problem in computer music software design.

Member(s): Hiroki Nishino, Norihidayati Podari, Stefania Sini, Chamari Edirisinghe and Adrian D. Cheok

Alice and Her Friend is an interactive book for visually-impaired children. While we put a significant focus on multisensory interaction, the book is designed entirely in black, intending both to emphasize that visually-impaired people also enjoy rich multisensory experiences and to raises awareness of the needs that visually-impaired children have. We used the book to interview experts in related fields to investigate practical needs among visually-impaired children. Based on their insights, we also propose a novel research topic, “creative technologies for the disabled”; it is necessary to support people with disabilities to create what they need by themselves, since the degrees and types of visual impairment significantly differ among visually-impaired people.

Member(s): Hiroki Nishino.

This new fiducial tracking method is based on the combination of topological region adjacency and angle information, whereas existing works by Johnston’s RAG target [3], Costanza’s D-Touch [2], and Kaltenbrunner’s reacTIVision [1] are all based on the uniqueness of the topological region adjacency structure.

Such a combination of the topological region adjacency and angle information enables a wider unique ID range, while maintaining the merit of fast and robust fiducial tracking in topology-based approach. Our method makes it possible to obtain the 6 degrees-of-freedom (6DoF). Such problems of a narrow unique ID range and lack of 6DoF information have been the main deficits in most systems based on topological region adjacency approach, when compared to other fiducial tracking methods.

References

Bencina, R., Kaltenbrunner, M. and Jorda, S. (2005). Improved Topological Fiducial Tracking in the reacTIVision System. Proc of IEEE Procams’05

Costanza, E .and Robinson, J.(2003). A region adjacency tree approach to the detection and design of fiducials, Proc of VVG 2003, pp.63-69

Johnston,D.(2001).UntetheredVR.Ph.Dthesis, University of Essex

Member(s): Hiroki Nishino.

Topolo Surface is a 2D fiducial tracking system, which is a prototype system that we developed to implement a novel fiducial tracking method based on the combination of topological region adjacency and angle information.

Existing systems based only on topological region adja- cency information, such as D-Touch and ReacTIVision, have several desirable features including fast processing speed and robustness against false positive detection. Yet, the method used in these systems also has several deficits. The unique ID range in existing topology-based methods is very narrow and the cost to generate the set of such unique fiducial markers can be computationally very expensive, especially when compared to existing matrix-based systems. Also, several useful techniques to improve robustness, such as CRC or hamming distance, cannot be applied to existing topology-based systems.

Our novel fiducial tracking method utilizes the combination of topological region adjacency and angle information. By using topological information together with geometrical information, our prototype system achieved much larger unique ID range at very cheap computational cost to generate its fiducial markers. This is achieved while maintaining the desirable features of fast processing speed and robust- ness against false positives in a topology-based method. Also, CRC or hamming distance can be applied to our method to improve the robustness, if necessary.