26 September 2008

日本バーチャルリアリティ学会第13回大会 (13th Virtual Reality Society of Japan Annual Conference) in 奈良 (Nara, Japan), 24-26 September 2008

The 日本バーチャルリアリティ学会 (Virtual Reality Society of Japan) organized its 13th annual conference in 奈良 (Nara, Japan) on 24-26 September 2008. My talk "ユビキタス社会における、快適かつ能率的な操作の為の個人プロファイルの設立:一般人の意見?" ("Creation of Personal Profiles for Comfortable and Efficient Interactions in U-Societies: Laymen’s Views?") occurred during the first session on wearable computing.

After my 10-minutes talk, an attendee asked me whether we consider levels in personal profiles. "Levels of description" going from vague to precise would help deal with more or less trusted services; "levels of abilities" would help deal with variations of abilities due to e.g. chronic diseases. We should consider both types of levels in future works.

Then a manager from NTT Docomo asked why we include cognitive information in profiles. To answer, I took children as an example: children understand relationships between objects differently from adults; groupings of menu items meaningful for adults may be inappropriate for children. Thus, knowing the cognitive characteristics of a user enables a smart space to dynamically select an appropriate visual interface for a child versus an adult, and to modify it when the child's abilities change with age.

Finally, the chairman asked me how we can protect information that a user wants to hide when a game system evaluates abilities for profiles. During my talk I had proposed to build and update personal profiles using games so that the process is transparent and fun to users; I had also indicated that people may easily share perceptual information for profiles but not cognitive information. The chairman thus asked me how to link those two elements. Users cannot know what a game evaluates unless it is open source. A solution is for the game to provide a file describing abilities (ideally in an international standard) only to the user, who can then remove unwanted elements before providing it to services.

Read the post "Publication #21" for details about the publication. An English version is being prepared.

The conference went on finely and I could benefit from a visit of 国際電気通信基礎技術研究所 (Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International aka ATR), where I was impressed by the Geminoid of 石黒・浩 (ISHIGURO Hiroshi).

No comments: