Recently Computergram Tokyo bureau had the opportunity to view presentations of some research work being developed by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co at its Tokyo Information and Communications Research Laboratory. Researchers have developed a three-dimensional direct manipulation interface, fancifully called Zashiki-Warashi (a Zashiki-Warashi being an imaginary childlike creature in Japanese folklore, which plays unseen in a room, bringing happiness to the house it inhabits). The system developed aims to provide a three-dimensional means of manipulating a virtual reality scene, with a pen-type stylus used in place of a mouse. A further feature enables the manipulation of lighting and a camera, and with display of solids and use of simulated gravity to position objects. A Silicon Graphics Inc Iris workstation displays a scene of a room with furnishings, created with DesignBase, a three-dimensional computer-aided design database system from Ricoh Co, while the three-dimensional digitiser hardware, provided by Polhemus Inc, is able to manipulate objects by measuring the position and orientation of the stylus with six degrees of freedom. Matsushita researchers have developed beam cursor software for the interface of the stylus beam with the objects displayed, which is also used for re-orientation of the entire room itself. Features are similar to, but easier to use than, those obtained through the use of the glove and glasses of the system from VPL Research Inc, (which sister company Matsushita Electric Works licenses for work on kitchen design simulation system). The development is being conducted as part of research into human interfaces of the future, under the Ministry of International Trade & Industry Friend 21 Project which began in 1987. Other research work on display included the fruits of work under two Institute for Computers Of Tomorrow projects, also sponsored by MITI. Possibly the more relevant project of the two was the ToR91 Discourse management System, a new knowledge representation language based on the Situation Theory of analysis of language. ToR has possible future application as the back-end analysis engine for speech input through speech recognition or other means. Another system called the Rodin High-level Synthesis System provided an alternative means of solving Combinatorial Optimisation Problems through a technique called Parallel Simulated Annealing with Heuristic Knowledge. This adopted a probablistic approach as well as incorporating heuristic algorithms or rules. The technique, which is processed on a parallel computer with 16 processors, is used in applications such as integrated circuit design. The latter work is to be made public and the technology put into the public domain at the Conference on Fifth Generation Systems 1992, which is to be staged in Tokyo on June 1 to 5.
