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Realizing an environment that could automatically modify temperature and humidity according to human thermal comfort using an air conditioning system, it is necessary to measure the quantified changes of human thermal comfort continually. While quantifying thermal comfort, human biometric data and environmental data from various environments are needed. Therefore, we proposed a method to estimate human thermal comfort through regression analysis with human biometric data acquired by wearable sensors. Since the PMV model is generally used to evaluate human thermal comfort, the PMV value as the correct thermal comfort could be calculated from the PMV formula. We constructed an experiment environment for acquiring the subject's biometric data and gained the subjects' METs and clo value for calculating the PMV value. The biometric data were analyzed in three regression models to predict PMV value, and MAE and RMSE evaluated each regression model. The fewest number of wearable sensors could be confirmed by gradually reducing the feature values of input data of the regression model. As a result, we acknowledged that the human thermal comfort in an indoor environment could be estimated by heart rate data and left-arm temperature data while applying the proposed method to a daily environment.

In sports, automatic judgments made by electronic devices such as sensors are more accurate than those made by humans. However, automatic judgments are not always satisfactory to players and audiences. In sports that involve ambiguous judging criteria based on the subjectivity of human judges, rigorous automatic judgments may decrease the satisfaction of players and audiences. This decrease hinders the installation of automatic judging, even though computerized officiating is more effective than human judgment in several ways. In this study, we aim to construct an automatic judgment system that satisfies both players and audiences. To investigate the factors that affect the conviction of players and audiences, we implemented an automatic judgment system used for the Japanese statues game. Our system recognizes human motion using an acceleration sensor and automatically judges whether the players are moving. We conducted a user study to compare two threshold patterns for the recognition of the motion.

Purpose When designing a performance involving people and mobile robots, the required functions and shape of the robot must be considered. However, it can be difficult to account for all of the requirements. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a mobile robot in the shape of a ball that is used in theatrical performances. Design/methodology/approach The paper proposes a mobile robot that can give the audience the optical illusion of the unique movements of a sphere by mounting a spherical light-emitting diode (LED) display on a high-agility wheeled robot. Findings It was found that movements that are difficult to implement with existing mechanisms can nonetheless be visualized through the use of light. Originality/value The paper proposes the concept of using pseudo-physical movements in performances with robots. The authors built a robot that visually reproduces the movements of a rolling sphere and is capable of faster movements and easier position estimations in comparison with previous spherical robots.

This paper presents Query-by-Dancing, a dance music retrieval system that enables a user to retrieve music using dance motions. When dancers search for music to play when dancing, they sometimes find it by referring to online dance videos in which the dancers use motions similar to their own dance. However, previous music retrieval systems could not support retrieval specialized for dancing because they do not accept dance motions as a query. Therefore, we developed our Query-by-Dancing system, which uses a video of a dancer (user) as the input query to search a database of dance videos. The query video is recorded using an ordinary RGB camera that does not obtain depth information, like a smartphone camera. The poses and motions in the query are then analyzed and used to retrieve dance videos with similar poses and motions. The system then enables the user to browse the music attached to the videos it retrieves so that the user can find a piece that is appropriate for their dancing. An interesting problem here is that a simple search for the most similar videos based on dance motions sometimes includes results that do not match the intended dance genre. We solved this by using a novel measure similar to tf-idf to weight the importance of dance motions when retrieving videos. We conducted comparative experiments with 4 dance genres and confirmed that the system gained an average of 3 or more evaluation points for 3 dance genres (waack, pop, break) and that our proposed method was able to deal with different dance genres.

As social media has matured, uploading video content has increased. Multiple videos of physical performances, such as dance, are difficult to integrate into high-quality videos without knowledge of video-editing principles. In this study, we present a system that automatically edits dance-performance videos taken from multiple viewpoints into a more attractive and sophisticated dance video. Our system can crop the frame of each camera appropriately by using the performer’s behavior and skeleton information. The system determines the camera switches and cut lengths following a probabilistic model of general cinematography guidelines and of knowledge extracted from expert experience. In this study, our system automatically edited a dance video of four performers taken from multiple viewpoints, and ten video-production experts evaluated the generated video. As a result of a comparison of another automatic editing system, our system tended to be performed better.

When designing a performance involving people and mobile robots, we must consider the required functions and shape of the robot. However, it can be difficult to account for all of the requirements. In this paper, we discuss a mobile robot in the shape of a ball that is used in theatrical performances. Such a spherical robot should be agile and be able to roll like a ball. However, it is difficult to create a robot with all of these characteristics. Instead, we propose a mobile robot that can give the audience the optical illusion of the unique movements of a sphere by mounting a spherical LED display on a high-agility wheeled robot. The results of an experiment using a prototype indicate that this sort of robot can broaden the range of possible performances by giving the optical illusion of being a rolling sphere.