Tutorial 1
- Title : What is the Quality of Life Technology?
- Instructor : Dr. Jongbae Kim & Dr. Katherine D. Seelman
(Ph.D. University of Pittsburg, NSF Quality of Life Technology ERC)
- Objective : To understand what the Quality of Life matters.
- Target Audience : all participants who want to contribute to enhancing the quality of life of people with physically and cognitively impaired through the technology.
- Contents :
Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) could be envisioned as intelligent systems ranging from individual devices to comprehensive environments that enhance body and mind. They monitor and communicate with a person and understand his/her needs and task goals, and compensate for or replace diminished capabilities appropriately, safely, reliably and graciously. The key to the success of QoLT researches is to study real people in the real world in order to learn and fully understand their needs before building systems. However, this QoLT research is not a study of disability or etiology of impairment, but one for compensating or augmenting human functions; it is not a medical or social model, but one that addresses all aspects of function and participation in the community. As such, it is a platform for integrative research in which engineers of multiple disciplines, specialists in disabilities and aging and other non-technological experts collaborate to alleviate human impairments.
Jongbae Kim, Ph.D. received a BA in the Applied Statistics from Yonsei University of Korea and completed his MS program in the Industrial Engineering at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. He received Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, all in Rehabilitation Science. Dr. Kim is a faculty member of the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology. Dr. Kim is currently leading research tasks of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on TeleRehabilitation. He works as a research faculty of the NSF Quality of Life Technology ERC with robotics and computer science scientists in the Carnegie Mellon University. He also co-works with the Georgia Tech research team for RERC on Workplace Accommodation and works as an education coordinator and state-of-science conference coordinator for RERC on Spinal Cord Injury. While he was studying the MS program, he became spinal cord injured as the result of fall and became quadriplegic. After suffering several challenges, he has been serving Korean people with SCI and taught students of Rehabilitation Engineering Department of the Nazarene University in Korea. It is his sincere hope that his experiences with SCI for 22 years can be used to help develop solutions to improve educational, vocational and quality of life of future generations of people with SCI and other disabilities.
Tutorial 2
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Title : Recent Advances in Virtual Reality Technology - Virtual Reality 2.0 -
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Instructor : Michitaka Hirose, Tomohiro Tanikawa, Kunihiro Nishimura, Atsushi Hiyama(Tokyo University)
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Objective :
Almost 20 years have passed since the word “Virtual Reality” was first used. At the very beginning, pre-matured VR technology came with novel and eye-catching devices such as HMD and Data Glove. At that time, user could enjoy only toy-like world. However, during the two decades, the quality of the VR was largely improved thanks to the improvement of multimedia devices. In addition to that, various styles of technologies which stand on neighboring area of VR technology have been developed and established. For example, novel technologies such as brain-computer interfaces, position sensing technologies, wearable computers can be integrated into VR technology, and will contribute to broaden the field of VR technology framework. We can call this new framework of VR technology as "Virtual Reality 2.0".
In Japan, many novel VR related projects are now under way. Some projects are related with media arts, robotics, digital-archives. In this tutorial, we want to introduce the current activities of "Virtual Reality 2.0" and how we can create new generation of VR technologies by integrating these novel technologies with conventional VR technologies. We also want to introduce five senses technologies including spatial displays and real world VR technologies as more concrete examples of “Virtual Reality 2.0” technology.
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Target Audience : Researchers, students and developers who are interested in virtual reality. People who want to know about the current situation of virtual reality research (especially in Japan).
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Contents :
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Biographcial Sketch of the presenters :
Dr. Michitaka Hirose is a professor of human interface at Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo. His research interests include enhanced human interface, interactive computer graphics, wearable computer and virtual reality. He has served as a project leader of various Virtual Reality projects in Japan. Through these projects, he successfully demonstrated sophisticated VR based museum exhibit and contributed to improved quality of VR technology.
Dr. Tomohiro Tanikawa is a lecturer at Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo. He is interested in five senses technology and image based rendering.
Dr. Kunihiro Nishimura is an assistant professor at Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo. His research is related to human interactions and information visualization.
Dr. Atsushi Hiyama is an assistant professor at Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo. He studies real world VR technology and sensing technologies.