The main contribution of this paper is to realize computer generated augmented flavors and establish a method to integrate gustatory information into computer human interactions. There are several reasons for the scarcity of research on gustatory information. One reason is that taste sensations are affected by a number of factors, such as vision, olfaction and memories. This produces a complex cognition mechanism for a user's gustatory sensation, and makes it difficult to build up a gustatory display which produces a specific taste on demand. Our hypothesis is that the complexity of gustatory sensation can be applied to the realization of a "Pseudo-gustatory" display that presents the desired flavors by means of a cross-modal effect elicited by visual and olfactory augmented reality. We propose the Edible Marker system, which can detect the state [number/shape/6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) coordinate] of each piece of bitten or divided food in real time, and the "Pseudo-gustation" method to change the perceived taste of food by changing its appearance and scent. We construct "MetaCookie+" as an implementation and discuss its validity through an exploratory study.

In this paper, we introduce a concept called "virtual co-embodiment", which enables a user to share their virtual avatar with another entity (e.g., another user, robot, or autonomous agent). We describe a proof-of-concept in which two users can be immersed from a first-person perspective in a virtual environment and can have complementary levels of control (total, partial, or none) over a shared avatar. In addition, we conducted an experiment to investigate the influence of users' level of control over the shared avatar and prior knowledge of their actions on the users' sense of agency and motor actions. The results showed that participants are good at estimating their real level of control but significantly overestimate their sense of agency when they can anticipate the motion of the avatar. Moreover, participants performed similar body motions regardless of their real control over the avatar. The results also revealed that the internal dimension of the locus of control, which is a personality trait, is negatively correlated with the user's perceived level of control. The combined results unfold a new range of applications in the fields of virtual-reality-based training and collaborative teleoperation, where users would be able to share their virtual body.

The main contribution is to realize an efficient redirected working (RDW) technique by utilizing haptic cues for strongly modifying our spatial perception. Some research has shown that users can be redirected on a circular arc with a radius of at least 22 m without being able to detect the inconsistency by showing a straight path in the virtual world. However, this is still too large to enable the presentation of a demonstration in a restricted space. Although most of RDW techniques only used visual stimuli, we recognize space with multi-modalities. Therefore, we propose an RDW method using the visuo-haptic interaction, and develop the system, which displays a visual representation of a flat wall and users virtually walk straight along it, although, in reality, users walk along a convex surface wall with touching it. For the demonstration, we develop the algorithm, with which we can modify the amount of distortion dynamically to make a user walk straight infinity and turn a branch freely. With this system, multiple users can walk an endless corridor in a virtual environment at the same time.

In our research, we aim to construct a visuo-haptic system that can provide users with the sensation of touching virtual objects of varying shapes, using pseudo-haptic effects. In this paper, we focus on modifying the identification of a shape of a curved surface when touching it with a pointing finger, by displacing the visual representation of the user's hand. We compose a video see-through system through which we can change the shapes of objects the user is visually touching, and displace the visual representation of the user's hand as if he were touching the visual shape although in actuality he is touching another shape. Using this system we perform an experiment to investigate the effects of visuo-haptic interaction and we evaluate its effectiveness. The results show that over 80% of the participants answered that they perceived the virtual object's shape to be different from the actual shape they touched, which proves the possibility for constructing a novel visuo-haptic system.