Hi, this is Ryo Akiyama, M1 student.
We participated in IEEE VR 2016 on 19th – 23rd in March.
It was held in Greenville, South Carolina, USA.
In Greenville, it was nice weather and very nice place to stay.

Liberty Bridge(famous bridge in Greenville)

From our lab, Liem and I participated in the conference.
Liem’s poster was on the poster session, and he had short presentation about his poster.

Liem and his poster

Liem’s presentation

I had a presentation at the workshop, “Perceptual and Cognitive Issues on AR(PERCAR)”.
PERCAR is the workshop about human perception and cognition in augmented reality(AR).
It was my first presentation in conferences, so I was very nervous.
However, some professors told me that I did good job at the presentation.
I think my presentation was not so bad, but my answers to questions from audiences were bad.
I will work more…

Akiyama’s presentation

Also, Oshima’s paper is accepted to 3DUI, and his poster is on the poster session in IEEE VR.
But he was not there, so Kenny presented about Oshima’s paper in stead.

Kenny’s presentation

As I already mentioned, it was my first time to have presentation in a conference.
I felt that it is difficult to tell about researches to people who don’t know about it.
But it was very good experience, I want to have better presentation and question-and-answer next time.
I will work more to go IEEE VR 2017 in Los Angeles!!

Kato-Sensei and Yamamoto-sensei, on the bus

Hello, this is Ryo Akiyama, M1 student.
M2 students held “Thank you Party”(謝恩会) for teachers on 16th March.
This party is all planed by M2 students for the teachers.
It was held in Namba, and almost all the IMD members participated in.

First, we enjoyed eating, drinking, and talking freely.
After that, M2 and D3 students had speeches one by one.
Their talk was about grateful feelings for teachers and memories in this lab.

Speech by Jarkko

Also, Yamamoto-sensei will leave this lab, so he gave us a speech, too.

Speech by Yamamoto-sensei

After the great speeches, graduating students gave presents for four teachers and Ueno-san(secretary of our lab).

Gift for Sandor-sensei

It was really nice party.
I’m very happy to be a member of this lab.

I cannot imagine most of M2 and D3 students will leave this lab soon.
And, I wonder I can be such a nice student like them next year…
Anyway, congratulations on your graduation!!!
I wish graduating students and Yamamoto-sensei great success at the new place.

Kati-Sensei, Yamamoto-sensei, and M2, D3 students

Lab members, in front of the restaurant

Hello, I am M2 student Seiya Kojima.
We participated to a domestic workshop named Multimedia on Cooking and Eating Activities (CEA) on 7th-8th in March.

It was held in Nago City of Okinawa Prefecture.
Once more, Okinawa!
It was warm and comfy in Okinawa and I made a good presentation thanks to the climate.

Hibiscuses were in blooming.

About the workshop, it was organised by four technnology committees and four different workshops were held at the same time.
The co-organizers were
1. Multimedia and Virtual Environment (MVE)
2. Image Engineering (IE)
3. Image Media Quality (IMQ)
4. Communication Quality (CQ)

On campus of Meio University, the venue of workshop.

I presented our research in CEA that was jointly hosted with MVE.
I am going to introduce our research first because some of you might think why Cooking and Eating Activities?
We are focusing on a diet therapy for patients with chronic kidney disease.
We analyzed nutritional data from diets for patients by using KNApSAcK Family Database and developed menu planning support method and evaluated its effectiveness.
In our laboratory, we are using not only AR or VR technologies, but also some other technologies for interaction design reseach.
I am studying this topic in cooperation with Computational Systems Biology Laboratory in NAIST and Faculty of Agriculture in Kinki University and trying to develop a beneficial system.

My presentation title slide.

About workshop, there were some research presentations I was interested in.
The research which introduced a novel method to present virtual food texture by using electrical muscle stimulation to the muscles of mastication was interesting because the technology might be able to increase the level of satisfaction that people get from eating.
There were many other research for cooking and eating activities such as automatic calorie estimation from food images and changing the taste of beverages by modifying their saturation.
I saw massive potential in using information technologies for eating activities.

Lunch with professors of our research project.

I discussed with professors and students from other universities in a social gathering.
I am very thankful to all professors whom took me to this workshop.

We enjoyed eating tuna at social gathering.