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Virtual re-creations of real-world places are attractive and becoming more popular. Attractiveness of re-created place is commonly determined by the degree of visual similarity to the original places. Even if the re-creation has poor similarity to the original, there are cases in which people recognize and allow the re-creation to have similarity as the same entity. However, the mechanisms and factors behind this contradiction have not yet been studied. This is the first study focusing on the activity and meaningofpeoplewhentheyfeelsamenesstoare-createdplace. Thispaper investigates the concept of place sameness, which is defined as the degree of similarity between an original and a virtual re-creation that represents the original place. Further, the factors of place sameness are explored using a classroom re-creation task with virtual reality (VR) technology. The participants were instructed to recreate two classrooms within virtual environmentsusingvirtualfixtures. Asresults, thedisplaydevicesinRoom B, the student desks in Room A at the memory index, display devices in RoomA,andstudentdesksandothersinRoomBattheaveragedistancehad moderate or large correlations with the place sameness index. The results suggest that the reproducibility of the number of objects related to activities in a place, and the inaccuracy of the positions of objects are factors of place sameness. Our own interpretation of the uncanny valley effect of a place was also partially observed. The main contributions of this study are the proposal of the concept of place sameness as a new perspective for virtual re-creation research and the finding of promising factors for that., Comment: Submitted to IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems

We developed an original method of in situ nanoscale characterization of thermal resistance utilizing a high-resolution transmission electron microscope (HRTEM). The focused electron beam of the HRTEM was used as a contact-free heat source and a piezo-movable nanothermocouple was developed as a thermal detector. This method has a high flexibility of supplying thermal-flux directions for nano/microscale thermal conductivity analysis, and is a powerful way to probe the thermal properties of complex or composite materials. Using this method we performed reproducible measurements of electron beam-induced temperature changes in pre-selected sections of a heat-sink alpha-Al(2)O(3)/epoxy-based resin composite. Observed linear behavior of the temperature change in a filler reveals that Fourier's law holds even at such a mesoscopic scale. In addition, we successfully determined the thermal resistance of the nanoscale interfaces between neighboring alpha-Al(2)O(3) fillers to be 1.16 x 10(-8) m(2)K W(-1), which is 35 times larger than that of the fillers themselves. This method that we have discovered enables evaluation of thermal resistivity of composites on the nanoscale, combined with the ultimate spatial localization and resolution sample analysis capabilities that TEM entails.

We report ab-initio calculations of the spin-dependent transport and magnetoresistance of Ni atom wires. The electronic states are calculated using a numerical pseudo atomic orbital basis set in the frame work of the density functional theory, and the conductance is calculated using the Green's function method. We show a magnetoresistance of 250%, which is explained by the scattering of d orbital channels., Presented at the 7th International Conference on New Phenomena in Mesoscopic Structures and the 5th International Conference on Surfaces and Interfaces of Mesoscopic Devices, held in Maui, HI, on 27 Nov-2 Dec 2005. Published in the Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on New Phenomena in Mesoscopic Structures and the 5th International Conference on Surfaces and Interfaces of Mesoscopic Devices, 2005.