Title: A tele-immersion environment for traditional Japanese crafting system over the Japan Gigabit Network

Authors: Tomoyuki Ishida, Akihiro Miyakawa, Yoshitaka Shibata

Addresses: Graduate School of Software and Information Science, Iwate Prefectural University, Japan. ' Information Policy Division of Nanao-city, Ishikawa, Japan. ' Graduate School of Software and Information Science, Iwate Prefectural University, Japan

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a tele-immersion environment for the traditional Japanese crafting system, which uses a highly immersive system based on a Virtual Reality (VR) environment, such as multiple Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) distributed at various places in Japan that are interconnected to each other over the ultra-high-speed network (Japan Gigabit Network 2). Using this system, the world of the traditional Japanese crafting environment could be expressed into an augmented virtuality environment that is an integration of cyberspace and the real world. Moreover, human sensibility, called Kansei in Japanese, is reflected in the tele-immersion environment to improve nonverbal communication capability for additional information and provide a new interactive communication capability for remote users such as end users by sharing a common virtual space. A prototype system of the traditional Japanese crafting system is constructed to evaluate the functionality and performance. As a result, the usefulness of our suggested system was verified through the evaluation.

Keywords: multimodal communication; tele-immersion; sensitivity information processing; ultra high speed networks; VR presentation; virtual reality; Japan; human sensibility; kansei; traditional crafts; Japanese crafts.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWGS.2008.018496

International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 2008 Vol.4 No.1, pp.100 - 116

Published online: 25 May 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article