ONAKA Kenta and KUWAMIYA Yo, first-year master students in the Kobayashi Laboratory, Frontier Media Science Program, Graduate School of Advanced Mathematical Sciences, received the Best Presentation Award and Student Award, respectively, at the 17th International Workshop on Informatics (IWIN2023) (held on September 1 - September 4, 2023, in Hokkaido).
[Details of the award Mr. ONAKA received and his research]
He gave a presentation with the title, "Were you speaking to me?: A Trial to Use Physical Avatars to Establish Gaze Awareness in Hybrid Meetings." Focusing on the problem of remote participants in hybrid meetings having difficulty feeling "spoken to," he is researching meeting environments that make it easier for remote participants to engage in conversation. In the presentation, he proposed an environment in which a physical avatar of a remote participant is installed at the in-person venue, and the remote participant can view the venue through a bird's-eye view image. He plans to investigate the impact of the proposed meeting environment in the future based on line-of-sight information.
[Details of the award Mr. KUWAMIYA received and his research]
The winning presentation was titled “"I'm Going Right" or "Please Go to the Right": Disambiguation in Arrow Display on Mobile Robots to Avoid Collision with Passersby,” a study on the phenomenon that when a mobile robot uses an arrow to indicate the intention to pass a person, the meaning of whether the arrow is "I'm Going Right" or "Please Go to the Right" becomes ambiguous. The presentation reported the results of a survey on the understanding of the arrow and an expression that limits the meaning to "I'm Going Right.” In the future, he plans to work on facilitating the passing of mobile robots through unconscious guidance rather than signs that require interpretation, such as arrows.
≪
Japanese version≫
