Adrian Cheok's Mixed Reality Lab at Keio

This morning I visited the Mixed Reality Lab at Keio university, run by professor Adrian Cheok. I was invited along by David Sonntag, who was making the visit with Kenneth Boff, principle scientist at the Georgia Tech Tennenbaum Institute. Paul Cohen from http://sonicviz.com/ and Jonathan Coopersmith, Fulbright lecturer from the Tokyo Institute of Technology also joined the visit.

We were given demonstrations of a variety of projects involving augmented reality including:

Human Pacman
A pacman game played outside by people wearing AR HUDs.

Babbage Cabbage
A living display capable of showing slow changes in data trends though the medium of color-changing plants.

Petino
A tactile device for augmenting children's social networks, while providing parental supervision and control.

Kitchen Media
A research project aiming at developing augmentation devices for use in the kitchen.

Wiz Qubes
A augmented story book system in which the child interacts with a computerized book using physical blocks.

Age Invaders
A space invaders game resembling Dance-Dance-Revolution in which elderly people can play with their family from a remote location.

I was very impressed by Adrian's team, it was clear that the lab is made up of a very wide rage of people from a variety of backgrounds, it's not just a bunch of techies. I plan to visit the lab in the near future to give a presentation on some the of the tech stuff I'm involved with, such at the Tokyo Hackerspace.