INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Maybe we can start by describing the Life Spaces project.
Answer
First of all, Life Spaces is a project of art and technology that we're
developing in ATR Media Integration and Communication Resource
laboratories in Kyoto, Japan. The basic idea of Life Spaces is trying to
have an interactive evolutionary environment where the user can be in
charge of creating creatures and also controlling the creatures by
giving them food or making them have children. The whole system is like
a virtual environment of life where creatures are born, they need to eat
to survive, they grow up and become models, they find somebody to mate
with and then they have kids, and finally they grow old and die. The
user plays a very important role in the whole system by giving the
feedback for the evolution of the system itself.
Question 2
You talked about artificial life, can you help us understand what it
is?
Answer
Well, artificial life has a very broad meaning. There are many
examples for the world of artificial life; in the case of Life Space
it is a simulation of what life is in real nature. We are trying to
simulate with a simple model how life works in the real world.
Question 3
How do you get this kind of art? You are an engineer, perhaps you began
with something different that then became a form of art. How does this
happen?
Answer
I myself am a computer graphics scientist, I'm an engineer, but in ATR
we have a project called Art and Technology where we are supposed to
merge the skills of artists and engineers to see if we can come up
with better idea of telecommunications and creation of environments. I
was doing mostly virtually reality and computer graphics, image-based
rendering works before, but I thought that joining with some artists
would give us a broader view of what an interface computer is. As an
engineer, before joining the art and technology project I was mostly
concerned with the details of the exact events and actions that the
interface should have. But given the feedback from the artists, I
noticed that there are some other important facts that we need to take
into account. That is the user's role in the system. So the artists
gives us the concept or the idea of what a good interface between
humans and computers could be, and we are in charge of programming and
realizing what this concept might be and also adding some extra
elements. We have a group of three people, myself and Christa Sommer
and Lauren Mignon from Austria and France, respectively, and we're
working together in ATR.
Question 4
Can you give us a definition of an interface? What is a good interface
for a better relationship between man and the machine, in this case, man
and computer?
Answer
Again, this definition of interface could have a sense of personal
work. Everybody has his own interpretation of the word
"interface". But we believe that interface is something that
mediates between you and something else. So the idea of a good
interface, especially between computers and humans, is that the
interface should be only a means and not a goal. So the user should be
able to interact with the system without even noticing that there is
an interface between him and the computer. My personal point of view
of a good interface would be one that the user could ignore while
still giving the user as much interaction as possible with the system.
Question 5
What about the new trend in computer graphics? Are you oriented to
work on something that is near reality or do you think that computer
graphics can still work on in a purely imaginative world?
Answer
As far as trends in computer graphics are concerned, it really depends
on which applications you are interested in. If you are into games,
you might be able to follow computer graphics as they are now: you
have a 3-D model of a wall and then the user can navigate the model
and play or interact with some characters in the scene. But personally
I think that the way in the future we will be trying to make computer
graphics not look like computer graphics. We want them to be as
natural as possible, and we want them to be as simple but still as
rich as in normal life. In Life Spaces we avoid trying to have
creatures with any specific shape. We made them abstract just to point
out that the most important thing is not what you're interacting with
but the way you interact with it. We can talk about computers graphics
for hours and hours; you have many different branches, many, many
different applications. One of them will be image space rendering or
radiosity and CAD systems. There are many other applications, games,
virtual reality and other applications. You see some applications in
architecture, some applications in hospitals, and telepresence; there
are simply so many different things you can have.
Question 6
Could you talk about the other project you are working on at the ATR?
Answer
In ATR I was working on a project that is called Virtual Space
Teleconferencing System which was trying to create a virtual
environment for many users. Actually, we have a system working for
four different sites, all of them located remotely, where the users
were supposed to share the environment and discuss ideas and modify
objects and whatever the discussion topic was about inside this
virtual environment. I was mainly working on the speech recognition
and the mapping of this speech into actions in the virtual world. Of
course ATR is a laboratory for advanced telecommunication research.
The whole idea in ATR is to try to look at telecommunications in the
future. We have four labs. The labs are doing speech recognition,
speech translation, speech synthesis. There are some other labs that
are doing human information processing, and another project is trying
to deal with emotions. We want the computer to somehow understand the
emotions of the user and adapt appropriately to the user depending on
the user's emotions. Especially in our laboratory, in many integration
and telecommunication laboratories, we're doing mostly computer
graphics related to work like the creation of virtual environments,
the creation of new interfaces of tracking the user using computer
vision techniques in order to map the actions of the user into actions
in the virtual world.
Question 7
Do you work or co-operate with other laboratories around the world?
Answer
We have a lot of agreements with labs especially in Europe, France,
Italy and England, Spain. We also collaborate with some universities
in the US like MIT, the MediaLab and other laboratories on the West
coast in the San Francisco area.
Question 8
How do you judge the importance of all these kinds of research that
you do in these laboratories?
Answer
I think that since we are doing basic research, what we are working on
now might not be easily applied. But we are always trying to come up
with new and better ideas on how telecommunications should work,
trying to find different ways of having a better and more realistic
and less cumbersome way of communicating ideas to people. I think that
what we are doing now as a basic research should give us some results
in the near future. In a matter of years what we are doing now as
research will become products for people to use their normal lives.
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