U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi:The Virtual Humanoid You Can Reach
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An augmented-reality system that synchronizes a humanoid robot and a virtual avatar. Users experience shaking hands with a computer-graphic avator. |
Enhanced Life
U-Tsu-Shi-O-Mi integrates the sensing and control systems of space robots, the humanoid robot design, mixed-reality systems, and 3D graphics.
Goals
1. To build digital humans that you can touch and talk with.
2. To propose them as novel digital media content that can be merged with many other technologies such as robotics, mixed reality, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence.
Innovation
An integrated sensing and control system has been developed to keep the robot and the avatar motions synchronized during their physical contacts with humans:
- An optical tracker tracks the head movements of the person wearing the head-mounted display.
- The robot has joint-angle and force-detecting sensors.
- The avatar uses the robot's joint-angle sensor data of the robot as its posture control commands.
This work is a proposal to build a new kind of digital-media content that merges humanoid robots and mixed reality. Thirty years from now, we will be able to buy a sophisticated humanoid robot, overlay the computer graphics of Ichiro, and play baseball with it.
Contact
Michihiko Shoji
NTT DoCoMo
mshoji@acm.org
Contributors
Atsushi Konno
Tohoku University
Kanako Miura
NTT DoCoMo
