PotPet: Pet-like Flowerpot Robot

ABSTRACT We propose a flowerpot-type robot called PotPet that helps users grow plants more effectively and enjoyably. PotPet acts autonomously like pets: it automatically moves to sunny places or approaches people when it requires water. Basically, PotPet consists of a "real" plant, several sensors to detect plant status, a robot with wheels for mobility, and a microcontroller to control the above devices. Here we explain the concepts and implementation of the PotPet

Kitchen of the Future and Its Applications

キッチンは生産の場であり,調理を媒介とした教育とコミュニケーションの場でもある.このため,家庭環境の中でも,実用的なユビキタスコンピュータアプリケーションの可能性が高い場所と考えられる.そこで筆者らは,コンピュータ,ネットワーク,センサを組み込んだ未来のキッチン,Kitchen of the Futureを開発している.このコンピュータ強化されたキッチンにより,単に調理の効率を向上させるだけではなく,キッチンを学びとコミュニケーションの場として復活させることができると考えている.本論文では,Kitchen of the Futureを利用して実装した,調理の記録とネットワークでの公開と共有,調理過程の再生,遠隔地キッチンを接続しての調理支援,調理教材の効果的な提示を実現するアプリケーションについて報告する.\r\n\r\nA kitchen is a place of food production, education, and communication. As it is more active place than other parts of a house, there are lot of potential ubiquitous computing applications in a kitchen. We are developing a computer-augmented kitchen environment: the Kitchen of the Future that embeds various computing elements into a standard kitchen unit. In this paper, we will describe overview of the Kitchen of the Future system and its three applications, i.e, web-ready recipe pages generator, video conference system for cooking instruction, and interactive cooking navigation system

Virtual Glassboat: For looking under the Ground

A simple augmented reality system called the Virtual Glassboat is described in this paper. The Virtual Glassboat is a cart mounted computer display which scrolls with the movement of the cart. By pushing the cart over a floor or over the ground, a user can browse the underneath information such as gas or water piping work as if he/she were looking under the ground through the display

Scroll Display: Pointing Device for Palm-top Computers, Asia Pacific Computer Human Interaction

Abstrac

TongueDx: A tongue diagnosis system for personal health care on smartphone

On the TongueDx system, users can keep track of their health condition by recording the color of tongue coating and body on smartphones. In fact, this method is based on the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) theories. Tongue diagnosis is one of the important diagnosing techniques in TCM. In order to avoid color error affected by surrounding light, a tongue color calibration by using teeth color as a standard is proposed in this paper. K-means algorithm is used to separate tongue coating from body. From the line graph of tongue coating and body color displayed on smartphones, people could know their health conditions timely and early discovery of some diseases without going to the hospital comes to be possible. If necessary, the personal tongue images can be sent to TCM practitioners to get further diagnosis. In the long run, the tongue image database is probably valuable for TCM research from time being