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Haptic media, as a third type of 3D media besides 3D visual and 3D audio, is essential to realize the true 3D multimedia. Recently, pseudo-haptics has gained considerable attention since it can produce a haptic feeling without specific hardware. We first categorized pseudo-haptics into three types based on perception phases and virtual hand form. A series of experiments quantitatively proved that all three types of pseudo-haptics can be perceived and exhibit interesting phenomena, e.g., pseudo-haptics might be deduced by real haptic sensation or specific visual effect.

We have been studying the use of "Rich Media" to support creative and intelligent human activities. Specifically, for over ten years we have been focusing on the 3D space as a "Rich Medium" and developed many 3D sketch systems that support the design of 3D objects. However, we found that designers in the real world do not use them. The fundamental problem is the lack of an indispensable function for using the 3D space. To overcome this problem, we have proposed "life-sized and operable" design principles. Although the new design concept made the 3D space truly useful and promoted the designer to use such a system, it revealed new problems, i.e., Limited design space. In this paper, we extend this "life-sized and operable" 3D sketch system by using three design spaces, which enables the user to traverse between 2D drawing and 3D drawing spaces, between miniature and actual sizes, between rough sketching and precise design, and among still, operable, and hap tic sketching.

A 75-year-old woman had a nodule on her cheek. Histopathological examination revealed lobular proliferaton of clear cells in the center and basaloid in the peripheral area of the tumor. The clear cells were PAS positive, diastase sensitive. The basaloid cells showed palisading. Tumor cells were CEA (-) S-100 (-) . Nuclear atypio was seen. We diagnosed it as a malignant trichilemmoma.Immunohistochemical stining using various monoclonal anticytokeratin antibodies with formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded block specimans was performed. All the tumor cells were positive to simple epithelial cytokeratin such as CK8, 18. Clear cells were positive to differentiated stratified epithelial cytokeratin such as CK1, and simple epithelial cytokeratin CK19. Staining pattern was different from epidemis, but similar to outer root sheath between is thmus and infundidulum.

ネル製寝巻の染色に使用されたnaphthol-AS(以下N-AS)による色素沈着性接触皮膚炎の76歳の女性例を報告した。寝巻に残留したN-AS量(366μg/g)はこれまでの報告例の中では最低であった。患者が脳梗塞で寝たきりの状態になり寝巻の着用時間が長くなった点, 6年もの長期間にわたってネルの寝巻を使用した点がこのような低濃度のN-ASで感作の成立した原因と考えた。本症の報告は1990年に衣類の残留N-AS濃度が1000μg/g以下に自主規制されて以来減少しているが低濃度でも本例のように長時間の着用により発症する危険性があるので注意を要する。

Many methods for 3D position sensing using magnetic sensors, the ultrasonic sensors, special cameras, and so on have been proposed. Most of them, however, require specialized equipment that must be installed in the environment in question. This drawback prevents prototype 3D systems from reaching practical use in real fields. gUbiquitous 3D drawingh (namely, drawing a sketch in any 3D space in front of a designer), which appears as a common feature in a conventional 3D system, is investigated, and a new method for 3D position detection, called gUbiC3D (ubiquitous and collaborative 3D position sensing) architecture, is proposed. UbiC3D uses only a single camera with sensors and generates a global 3D map of visual feature points through users' collaboration. A preliminary experiment shows that the UbiC3D architecture is feasible.

We have been studying the creativity-centered media to ensure that systems truly support creative and intelligent human activities. However, it has gradually become obvious that current advanced support systems have a serious drawback: instead of promoting creative work, they often discourage creativity or let us stop thinking. In this paper, we focus on the 3D sketch system that supports the design of 3D objects by drawing them in the 3D space directly, because they are not used by designers in real fields but are just treated as a mere attraction in an amusement park. We propose three design principles, “Memory Capacity”, “Cognitive Mode”, and “Life-size and Operability”, which make the 3D sketch system truly useful for the designer. They have been gradually derived in the accordance with our cognitive experiment and developing series of 3D sketch system.

Thanks to the rapid progress of ICT, significant progress has been made in both the “generation” and “display” of the advanced medical information. However, serious problems still remain in both the “generation” and “display”. Therefore, we propose a simple augmented reality system that can display an ultrasonic image of exactly the same plane in the body of the patient that a doctor is looking at. The key idea is to utilize the fact that an ultrasonic probe moves inside the doctor's field of view and within the accessible range of the arm in order to simplify the augmented reality system. The prototype has been developed using only a see-through HMD and single camera and marker combination. Three simple interaction methods compensate for the limitations in 3D position sensing. We worked with a medical doctor to test the prototype system and found it to be effective.

A case of 77-year-old man with extramammary Paget's disease of the bilateral axillae was reported. 9 years ago, he was affected by urinary bladder carcinoma (transitional cell carcinoma, grade 1) and was treated by TUR.At first, he noticed erythema of the bilateral axillae, and subsequent some nodules on the right. As the nodules increased in number, swelling of the right arm appeared. The course had been quite rapid, and his death was caused by bacterial pneumonia after a year and a half since the first clinical appearance. In autopsy, metastasis were observed in lungs, liver, vertebral bodies, spleen, several lymph nodes and so on. It will be the first report in Japan which was died of extramammary Paget's disease of the axillae.

We have developed a design-support system which enhances design ideas by activating divergent thinking and convergent thinking of a designer, and offers a natural user interface that does not interrupt the thinking of a designer using the faculty of a computer. The system is composed of three user interfaces (UI)—a historical-view UI which analyzes partitions and branches of a design process automatically and displays them in the form of a tree structure, a spatial-view UI with which a designer can freely arrange past sketches in two-dimensional space, and a time-line and partial undo/redo UI which provides free undoing/redoing in units finer than a stroke—based on the results of analysis of a typical design process (i.e., designing a car), behavior analysis on several designers participating in a drawing experiment, and previous research. The effectiveness of this system was confirmed by the results of evaluation experiments with professional designers.

This paper presents a novel system which learns how the users want to control the entertainment robot with intuitive gestures. Two major problems are focused on this paper. One is how to distinct the user intuitive gestures, another is how to make the correspondence between the gestures and the control commands. Users want to use their own gestures which are not known a priori. These gestures must be classified by the systems by themselves. After the classification, the system must interpret the user intention to the control command which the user want to input. For instance, one may use waving hand gesture as the shutdown command, and another may assign the same gesture to the different command such as turning around. The primitive systems are implemented on the entertainment robot named AIBO. AIBO recognizes the gestures which are classified using Self-creating and organizing neural network. AIBO also learns how to interpret them into its command using Q-Learning technique. Some experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach.

The informal information can be so intuitive, emotional, personal, honest and subjective that it is very difficult to get them from the formal media. In this paper, we demonstrate a multimedia informal communication support system whose basic architecture is a combination of a wearable computer, a see-through head mounted display, a bone conduction speaker, and a 3D-pen. The user can create a "multimedia" graffiti such as a handwritten memo or a voice memo and place it in a real-world "multimedia" context such as at a certain location (by GPS), environmental sound, the real object (by RFID) and so on. The multimedia informal information is thus shared with others on the peer-to-peer self-organized network. We demonstrated the prototype system and conducted a preliminary evaluation.

Our goal is the implementation of an adaptive system for presenting information in a high cognitive load environment. High cognitive load environment users include car drivers, aircraft pilots and plant operators. We examined models for estimating a user's cognitive load for planning and creating a great variety of information presentation formats, and developed three numerical hypotheses related to cognitive load. It is necessary to examine the tendency of cognitive load for each combination of information presentation formats and each information presentation format as the first step to verify which of three hypotheses is correct. This paper describes an experiment to measure subjects' response to various combinations of information presentation formats. The results suggest that the combination of information presentation format influences the subjects' ability to recognize them and that there is a possibility that each of the three hypotheses is valid.

Research and development project of an indoor laser radar communication system has been going on to establish one of wireless communication network environments. In the project, corner-reflecting laser communicating target `the Hyper Versatile (HV) target', is used for a free-space laser data communication with low power consumption and for accurate position detection of the target. Reflective-type Liquid Crystal Spatial Light Modulator (LC SLM) is a possible attractive component of the HV target to solve the above subjects. The indoor laser radar system should operate at eye-safe wavelength region, however, no infrared operating SLM has been released because conventional SLMs have been designed and manufactured only for visible light operations. In this paper, infrared (1.06 micrometers ) operating Parallel Aligned nematic Liquid-crystal Spatial Light Modulator (PAL- SLM) is described for an application for the indoor laser radar system. Characteristics of the SLM and numerical simulations for corner-reflecting operations are indicated.

A human foreskin organ culture system has been developed to study the response of human skin to hormonal stimulation. Foreskins are maintained in culture on floating plastic supports which allows the epidermal surface to be exposed to air while the dermis is bathed in nutrient medium. Both black and white human foreskins can be maintained in organ culture for at least 1 wk with no change in the tissue structure or cell viability as determined by histochemical staining and by dopa reaction staining. Tyrosinase activity in both black and white human foreskin cultures decays markedly during the first 2 d of culture to a new steady state level which remains stable throughout the culture period. Both black and white foreskin cultures consistently demonstrate 2- to 10-fold increases in tyrosinase activity when treated with theophylline (1 mM). Approximately 90% of all skin cultures examined showed an increase in enzyme activity when treated with this phosphodiesterase inhibitor. Dibutyryl cAMP (0.1 mM) and [Nle4, D-phe7]-alpha MSH (10(-8) M), were also found to markedly stimulate tyrosinase activity in some skin cultures, whereas alpha-MSH and prostaglandin E1 produced only an inconsistent and small increase in the activity of the enzyme. Histamine (1 microM), vitamin D3 (1 microM), and retinoic acid (1 microM) failed to stimulate tyrosinase activity in either white or black foreskin cultures. This hormone-responsive organ culture system can be utilized to characterize the molecular processes responsible for the regulation of tyrosinase and pigmentation in human skin.

SUMMARY A 32 year old Japanese male has had several synchronized attacks of psoriatic arthritis and hypopyon-iridocyclitis. During exacerbations, he has a leucocytosis with neutrophilia and elevated C-reactive protein. Assessment for adhesiveness, aggregation and deformation of peripheral neutrophils revealed strikingly high ‘rheological activity’, whereas during periods of remission the activity was only slightly elevated above normal.

The distribution of transferrin receptor in normal human skin and its expression in psoriatic skin and various skin tumors have been investigated. Immuno-peroxidase staining was performed on biopsy specimens using monoclonal OKT 9 antibody, which reacts with transferrin receptor. Normal human skin showed positive staining with OKT 9 in eccrine glands and outer root sheaths of the hair. Sebaceous glands were also strongly positive. The basal layer stained very weakly. Psoriatic skin expressed OKT 9 strongly in the epidermis, especially in the area of the rete ridge. In squamous cell carcinoma, Bowen's disease, and malignant melanoma, a widespread and strong labelling reaction was found. Basal cell epithelioma and genital Paget's disease were partially and moderately positive in their staining pattern. No such positive staining pattern could be found in either nevus cell nevi or seborrhoic keratosis. These findings indicate that, in normal skin, transferrin receptor exists in eccrine glands, sebaceous glands, and outer root sheaths of the hair in greater amounts. High amounts of expression of this receptor in psoriatic epidermis and malignant tumors suggests that immunohistochemical demonstration of transferrin receptor parallels the proliferating activity of the tissue or tumor of the skin and may provide an useful aid for detecting such conditions.

SUMMARY A Japanese patient with epidermolysis bullosa acquisita (EBA) was autopsied, and direct immunofluorescence (DIF) testing was performed. Using this patient's serum (EBA serum) and three bullous pemphigoid (BP) sera, the anatomical distribution and immunological character-istics of EBA antigen and BP antigen were investigated by indirect immunofluorescence (IIF). EBA antigen showed the same anatomical distribution as BP antigen in DIF and IIF studies; both antigens were limited to the skin, tongue, oesophagus, trachea, cornea and bladder. EBA antigen was located on the dermal side of both NaCI and PBS-separated skin, whereas BP antigen was limited to the epidermal side. Ethanol fixation abrogated the antigenic stability of BP antigen, but not that of HBA antigen. No difference was found when acetone or formalin fixation was used. The separation methods and prefixation in ethanol could be useful techniques applicable to the classification of the bullous disorders which manifest circulating anti-BMZ antibodies.

A case of the bare lymphocyte syndrome without apparent immunodeficiency was observed. The patient had, in addition, ichthyosis vulgaris and sinobronchial disease. A pustular lesion developed at first on the anterior aspect of lower part of the left leg. This lesion gradually increased in size and evolved into giant indurated, irregular adjoining plaques. On biopsy, the histologic findings were similar to necrobiosis lipoidica. No human lymphocyte antigen (HLA) class I antigens were detected on peripheral mononuclear cells; however, HLA-DR antigens were present on B lymphocytes. Immunohistochemical studies disclosed defective expression of class I antigens in the non-lesional skin, but positive expression was demonstrated in the lesional area. HLA-DR antigens were expressed on keratinocytes and on most infiltrating inflammatory cells in the affected skin. It is therefore speculated that class I antigen appearance and mononuclear cell infiltrate each induces the other and that together they play an important role in the formation and enlargement of the skin lesion.

Tyrosinase activity was assayed in black and white human foreskin samples by measuring both the hydroxylation of tyrosine to dopa (tyrosine hydroxylase activity) and the conversion of [14C]tyrosine to [14C]melanin (melanin synthesis assay). Enzyme activity was found both in the particulate (75%) and soluble (25%) fractions of the cell. Membrane-bound tyrosinase was readily solubilized by either zwitter-ionic or nonionic detergents. The anionic detergent, sodium cholate, inhibited enzyme activity. Tyrosinase activity in black foreskin homogenates averaged almost three times that in white skin samples (33.8 pmols 3H2O/h/mg skin in black and 12.71 pmoles 3H2O/h/mg skin in white skin), although considerable overlap in activities existed among the two groups. Tyrosinase activities measured with two separate assays, tyrosine hydroxylase and [14C]melanin assays, were similar, suggesting that tyrosine hydroxylase activity is tightly coupled to melanin synthesis. Tyrosinase activity determined by either assay method generally correlated with skin melanin content. Kinetic analysis of tyrosinase from black and white foreskin revealed a Km for tyrosine of 2.5 X 10(-4) M in both skin types. Immunotitration experiments suggested that the difference in tyrosinase activities between white and black skin may be due, not only to different amounts of enzyme present in the melanocytes, but also possibly to differences in the catalytic activities of the enzyme found in melanocytes of black and white skin.

A case of extramammary Paget's disease that affected the lower anterior aspect of the chest of a 54-year-old man is reported. It is extremely rare that the disease arises in areas other than the anogenital region and the axillae.

A case of scrotal tongue is described. Histological and immunofluorescent findings revealed that this case was pemphigus vegetans, which should therefore be added to the differential diagnosis of scrotal tongue.