Title: Developing Media Workshops for Understanding Human Mind
Author: Junji Watanabe1, Masami Ikeda2
Affiliation: NTT Communication Science Labs, NTT Corporation, Japan1; Department of Psychology, Ochanomizu University, Japan2
Outreach in psychology is aimed to promote the overall wellbeing of individuals and the common humanity by acquiring a better understanding of the human mind. In the outreach activities, it is crucial to create teaching materials that are directly linked to students' individual experiences. To achieve it, “The Japanese Psychonomic Society Committee for developing teaching materials for high school students" used computer graphics technology. We developed visualization systems called "Face Homunculus Viewer" (FHV) and "Accidental Resemblance Generator" (AGR) for providing an opportunity for students to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between brains and minds. Additionally, we conducted media workshops on human touch perception using FHV and face recognition using AGR. Our contributions are the development of interactive systems for visualizing differences in perception and recognition within each individual and between individuals, and promote the engagement of students in scientific understanding. We believe that this indicates a new direction in science outreach in which computer graphics can be applied.
Title: Find out Your Own Face: Data Collection through Media Workshops
Author: Shigeo Yoshida
Affiliation: Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Japan
As a member of The Japanese Psychonomic Society Committee for developing teaching materials, we have developed a hands-on workshop "Find Out Your Own Face" with the theme of face memory.
We created an image processing algorithm that can convert one's face into someone else by changing the size and the position of one's facial features (eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, and facial contour) in photos. In the workshop, workshop participants answer that which one is the original face of a person (workshop lecturer, other participant, or oneself) among various face photos generated by the image processing algorithm. This workshop aims to promote workshop participants to understand the importance of the positional relationship of facial features about facial memory and the ambiguity of human memory through their experience. Moreover, we have investigated whether human senses coincide with the degrees of converting one's face into someone else, which were presumed in advance, based on the responses of various workshop participants including young and old. In this talk, I will describe the activities of past workshops, outline of the image processing algorithm, the data collected through the workshops, and how to collect them.
Title: Escape Room Meets Scientific Education: A New Way for Public Scientific Outreach
Authors: ChiaHuei Tseng1, Hsin-Ni Ho2, Junji Watanabe2
Affiliation: Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Japan1; NTT Communication Science Labs, NTT Corporation, Japan2.
Escape Room is live-action team-based games where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in order to accomplish a specific goal in a limited amount of time. It is an emerging and powerful outreach approach as it requires teamwork, communication, and delegation as well as critical thinking, attention to detail, and lateral thinking. In this talk, we will talk about our attempt to combine gamification and education to introduce Vision and Shitsukan research to the public, as well as the process of developing the escape room game that is run during the APCV conference. This escape room game is in a setting that a mysterious Tanabata festival will be held this year in the holy city Tainan. The players have to solve puzzles related to tactile sensitivity, tactile material recognition and visual face recognition in order to reawaken the magic power of the tanabata festival. Through this interactive adventure, we mean to bring players a fun and memorable scientific experience.
Title: From Cloud to Ground: Designing Accessible Exhibition for Science Communication
Authors: Jui-Chuan Chen1, Hsin-Drow Huang1
Affiliation: National Museum of Natural Science, Taichung, Taiwan
Effective, informative, and accessible exhibitions in science museums can promote interactions between visitors and exhibitions and enhance the impression on the visitors, especially when they are designed for interpreting abstract concepts and phenomena hard to observe. In National Museum of Natural Science, we employed accessible exhibits of vision-oriented designs to interpreting biological concepts and phenomena from organismal to molecular scales. The hands-on and mind-on experience created through vision and other sensations reinforce understanding the information we wish to convey. However, since visitors come in with different cultural experiences, their responses and cognitive curiosity towards the exhibitions may vary. A model of experience preference originated from the Smithsonian, named as IPOP, offers four dimensions to approach the visitors’ preferences during the development of exhibition. For the past 7 years in NMNS, we explored a variety of approaches for different visitors to meet their expectation. Collected data confirmed that the visitors are responsive and inspired when exhibitions: (1) are designed with ideas (I) for conceptual content or abstract thinking, (2) satisfy people (P) in emotional connections, (3) are enriched with objects (O) of visual language and aesthetics, and (4) provide physical (P) experiences and somatic sensations.