Waseda University · Computer Science
Professor Risa Kimura's research lab focuses on exploring innovative digital platforms that harness collective human sensory experiences—such as vision, hearing, and embodied perception—to foster deeper social connection, broaden perspectives, and support reflective, human-centered living in an increasingly complex world. The lab investigates how shared sensory data from wearable devices can be transformed into immersive, participatory experiences in virtual reality, promoting empathy, awareness, and creative problem-solving. Central to the lab’s work is the development of prototype platforms like CollectiveEars and Collective Human Eye Views, which aim to expand the scope of the sharing economy beyond physical assets to include human senses and viewpoints.
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Abstract Digital platforms are becoming critical infrastructures for supporting a variety of innovative services that enhance our everyday lives. These platforms need to offer not only rational services but also ludic or slow services that focus on human pleasure. One important aspect of creating innovative digital platforms is that their concrete requirements and potential opportunities are vague before they are designed. Thus, designing, prototyping and evaluating digital platforms iteratively
Abstract To acquire information from the real world and respond appropriately to life's circumstances, vision is indispensable for humans. However, due to its ubiquitous nature, we often perceive the world unconsciously, thereby overlooking the opportunity to contemplate the significance of sight. Seeing goes beyond being a mere method of gathering information; it is an act of uncovering new perspectives and engaging in profound exploration. Theories on creative problem-solving strongly advocate
Our daily lives are becoming increasingly complex. We sometimes tend to forget what is essential in our daily lives. In the near future, wearable devices such as smart eyeglasses will have cameras, so people's eye views captured by the cameras of the devices may be shared with other people. Our approach projects collective human's eye views in a virtual reality space that can easily be used in our daily lives to help people reflect various issues in the world. To explore our approach, we built a
The sharing economy, which uses digital technologies to share a variety of physical resources in a peer-to-peer manner, has been attracting attention in recent years. There are already widespread services including delivery services using personal cars, accommodation services using private homes, and outsourcing services using each person’s spare time. Investigating the feasibility of sharing other types of previous unexplored physical resources in traditional sharing economy services, particula
People usually maintain their positive and openness by watching a variety of views in the world. However, the current situation such as epidemiological situations restricts people’s physical movement and may narrow people’s abilities. Additionally, current digital platforms, especially social media platforms, confine people to a narrow territory by filtering information to only their favorites. Thus, their happiness is achieved through a very narrow view. Sharing Collective Human Eye Views is a
Worldwide, people are hearing various natural and artificial sounds, but it is hard to imagine how hearing the sounds from people collectively can be effectively used in our everyday lives if those sounds become sharable. The paper presents a digital platform to share collective human hearing named CollectiveEars, and shows potential opportunities and pitfalls of the CollectiveEars prototype based on a preliminary user study.
One of the most important topics in future crowdsourcing is how to influence and coordinate collective people to perform micro-tasks towards their common goal achieved through crowdsourcing activities. For achieving the goal, crowdsourcing needs to take into account coordinating collective people not only encouraging individual people. This paper presents the Game as Rhetoric model that is a framework for designing digital rhetoric, which is embedded in the real world and influences participants
In this paper, we propose a conceptual-model called the virtualizing/reframing (V/R) twin model to construct a digitally enhanced real world. The V/R twin model simulates the real world, and is an extension of the conventional digital-twin model, which can accurately model the real world and provides a general-purpose method for building digital services that enhance the real world. The major difference between the proposed model and the conventional digital-twin model is its consideration of di
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