Embodi
edMedia:Expandi
ngHumanCapaci
tyvi
aVi
rt
ualRealit
yandTelexi
stence(Keynote)Sus
umuTachiUniv
ersit
yofTokyo,J
apant
achi
@t
achilab.
org
ABSTRACTCCS Concepts

The information we acquire in real life gives us a holistic
experience that fully incorporates a variety of sensations andbodily motions such as seeing, hearing, speaking, touching,smelling, tasting, and moving. However, the sensory modalities
that can be transmitted in our information space are usuallylimited to visual and auditory ones. Haptic information is rarely
used in the information space in our daily lives except in the caseof warnings or alerts such as cellphone vibrations.
Embodied media such as virtual reality and telexistence should
provide holistic sensations, i.e., integrating visual, auditory,haptic, palatal, olfactory, and kinesthetic sensations, such thathuman users feel that they are present in a computer-generated
virtual information space or a remote space having an alternate
presence in the environment. Haptics plays an important role inembodied media because it provides both proprioception andcutaneous sensations; it lets users feel like they are touching
distant people and objects and also lets them “touch” artificial
objects as they see them.
In this keynote, an embodied media, which extends humanexperiences, is overviewed and our research on an embodied
media that is both visible and tangible based on our proposed
theory of haptic primary colors is introduced. The embodied
media would enable telecommunication, tele-experience, andpseudo-experience providing sensations such that the user would
feel like working in a natural environment. It would also enablehumans to engage in creative activities such as design andcreation as though they were in the real environment.
We have succeeded in transmitting fine haptic sensations, such as
material texture and temperature, from an avatar robot’s fingers toa human user’s fingers. The avatar robot is a telexistence
anthropomorphic robot, called TELESAR V, with a body andlimbs with 53 degrees of freedom. This robot can transmit not
only visual and auditory sensations of presence to human users
but also realistic haptic sensations. Our other inventions include
RePro3D, which is a full-parallax autostereoscopic 3D (threedimensional) display with haptic feedback using RPT(retroreflective projection technology); TECHTILE Toolkit, which
is a prototyping tool for the design and improvement of haptic
media; and HaptoMIRAGE, which is an 180°-field-of-view
autostereoscopic 3D display using ARIA (active-shuttered real
image autostereoscopy) that can be used by three users
simultaneously.

• Human-centered computing➝Mixed / augmented reality• Human-centered computing➝Virtual reality • Humancentered computing➝Haptic devices• Human-centeredcomputing➝User interface design

Keywords
Telexistence; embodied media; haptics; autostereoscopy; robotics;
VR; TELESAR; RPT

BIOGRAPHY
Susumu Tachi is currently Professor Emeritus of The Universityof Tokyo, Japan, and is leading several research projects ontelexistence, virtual reality and haptics including JST ACCEL
Embodied Media Project at Tachi Laboratory of Institute ofGerontology, The University of Tokyo. He is the 46th President ofthe Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), aFounding Director of the Robotic Society of Japan (RSJ), and theFounding President of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan(VRSJ).
Dr. Tachi received his B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from The
University of Tokyo, in 1968 and 1973, respectively. He joined
the Faculty of Engineering of The University of Tokyo in 1973,and in 1975, he moved to the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory,
Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Japan, where heserved as the Director of the Biorobotics Division. From 1979 to1980, Dr. Tachi was a Japanese Government Award Senior
Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
USA. In 1989, he rejoined The University of Tokyo, and served as
Professor at the Department of Information Physics andComputing till March 2009. He served also as Professor andDirector of the International Virtual Reality Center at Keio
University, Japan from April 2009 till March 2015.
From 1988, he has served as Chairman of the IMEKO TechnicalCommittee on Measurement in Robotics and directed theorganization of ISMCR symposia and received IMEKODistinguished Service Award in 1997. He initiated and foundedInternational Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence(ICAT) in 1991 and International-collegiate Virtual Reality
Contest (IVRC) in 1993. He received the 2007 IEEE VR CareerAward, and served as General Chair of IEEE Virtual Reality
Conferences.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citationon the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.
For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

ICMI’16, November 12–16, 2016, Tokyo, Japan
ACM. 978-1-4503-4556-9/16/11...$15.00
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2993148.3011261

3