Sony CSL　大和田　茂


Statement of Interest

Shigeru Owada at Sony CSL

I am interested in developing a home entertainment content that utilizes
ubiquitous appliances network. I believe that ubiquitous network is a fun
space and we can use that as a new generation platform for games.

Our first idea is to associate virtual autonomous characters with home
electronic devices such as audio players, TVs, cameras and so on.
We are currently developing a software that visualizes "fairies"
of home appliances. They autonomously communicate each other and
even control real-world devices without human interaction. For example,
a fairy of camera sends a photo to a fairy of TV to display it.

We can simply observe and enjoy their world, or if desired, we can
communicate with them by talking to the characters by natural language.
 This "talk" function can also be used to inquire the device state or
manipulate it.(unfortunately, only keyboard input is supported so far
and conversation data works through simple pattern matching.)

If one feels the fairies' behavior annoying, they can also scold them
by shouting to the microphone attached to the central control panel.

Aiming at a more practical usage, we recently started developing an
Android OS version of the fairy software, which can still display fairies
on the screen, and also recognize AR tags attached to real-world devices
to precisely align virtual characters with real-world objects. We are also
interested in obtaining visual information through the attached camera,
using simple image processing.

Anyway, we are interested more on fun usage of ubiquitous home network
than protocol layer implementation. I hope to meet someone who finds
our work interesting.