At the end of the 2025 academic year, Son-san from the doctoral program, along with Wang-san, Oda-kun, Kawahara-kun, Kinoshita-kun, and Miyoshi-kun from the master's program, completed their degrees and moved on to new stages of their careers. We wish them every success in the years ahead. Son-san will continue research in a closely related field, so we hope to have opportunities to meet again at future conferences. At the same time, a new academic year has begun, and our lab is pleased to welcome Ito-san, Omiya-kun, and Matsuda-san as new first-year master's students. With these new members, the lab is entering a fresh new phase, and we look forward to the year ahead.

A paper by our PhD candidate Killian Duay has been published in PLOS ONE. Previous studies examining how certain colors appear unusually bright or unnatural depending on the color distribution of a scene have typically relied on simple color patches. Killian’s experiments demonstrate that the same phenomenon also occurs in more realistic images, such as photographs of flowers. These findings provide important insights for color representation in emerging technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Killian is currently studying abroad in France. We wish him continued success as he pursues his research there.

• Killian Duay, & Takehiro Nagai: Optimal colors can predict luminosity thresholds in natural scenes. PLOS ONE. 21(3):e0343984. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0343984.

Four second-year master’s students, who had just completed their thesis defenses, gave their final off-campus presentations of their student lives at the Human Information Research Group of the Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers (ITE). We later received the wonderful news that one of them, Kinoshita-kun, was selected for the Best Presentation Award. It was an excellent way to close out the program with such great recognition just before graduation. Congratulations!

Several members of our laboratory presented their research at the Vision Society of Japan (VSJ) Winter Meeting. A special congratulations goes to Watanabe-kun (M1), who received the Best Presentation Award. His award-winning study focused on data collected during his month-long research stay in Australia. It is a fantastic achievement to see such dedicated international fieldwork recognized by the society.