１．担当ＰＭ

  David J. Farber ＰＭ　(Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University)

２．採択者氏名

３．プロジェクト管理組織

　 テクノロジーシードインキュベーション株式会社

４．採択金額

　 11,243,000 円

５．テーマ名

　 Universal Playground  ~ Empathy-enhanced simultaneous communication platform for children worldwide ~

６．関連Webサイト

　　なし

７．申請テーマ概要

I propose to develop a simultaneous playful communication platform for global children called Universal Playground.

Regardless of languages, cultures, and physical distances, participants enjoy sharing their moments and experiences through networked fun activity contents by this web application with Webcam-based rich client system.

The proposed system helps participants to imagine the real existence others in the other side of the Internet line and to foster their personal bondings each other with respecting cultural diversity naturally.

There are two major constrains.  Firstly, users are children of different language group.  Secondly, they live in different countries and have never met each other physically in face-to-face.

In order to overcome these two issues, non/less-verbal fun activity contents using multimodal Webcam communication will be developed.

As an applied interface technology, Empathy-enhanced Webcam system is proposed that is realized by

inventive GUI features to facilitate positive communication among users and to decrease the intrinsic

 psychological stress in simultaneous Webcam communication such as Internet delay, unclear sound

from communication companion, and anxiety of the mutual understandings.

Besides, pictogram and machine translation are employed to support verbal communication.

As a fundamental language technology, pictogram and machine translation via semantic web service

will be utilized for the language scalability.

The pictogram system component evolves from my previous work in Exploratory Software Project in

2004.

In addition, as a scalableand outreach technology, contents plug-in system will be developed with

three fun activity contents plug-ins as a starter.

The client application will be implemented by Flash for the easy operation in the real onsite fields

worldwide.

This is an innovative challenge to bring the novel communication paradigm that people, who do not

share languages and never met each other physically, will communicate and would be friends each

other which was impossible in the long history of humankind.

８．採択理由

I found this an interesting effort for several reasons; first I agree with the proposers that getting children of various cultures to know each other ill most likely help our future. I saw this happen with my children and several Japanese children many years ago when they spend several days with each other enjoying even though they could not speak each other’s language. Being able to do this or even part of this using the Internet would be a very challenging and worthwhile effort.

The proposed use of language translation combined with picturegrams seems like an interesting approach to try to extend.

One of the reasons that makes this proposal interesting at this time is to soon to be advent of very in-expensive computers - claimed $100. If these are equipped with communications capability than this would extend the range of the playground to the less developed and often isolated parts of the world. That could have both a societal advantage as well as a potential large audience of users.

There are, however, a set of issues that will challenge the proposers -

they include the need to make their system child proof. Often, if the

toy breaks because it is too complex, young children drop the use of

the toy. The Playground proposed here must be very user friendly -

and the users are the children of a broad spectrum of ages. So the

system must be friendly to young children yet usable by older children

who demand more un-child like properties. Doable but challenging.

Also there is a big issue of privacy in dealing with children. As has

been shown often, there are adults who try to “trap: children. How to

 enforce access to the Playground to children only is an unsolved but

 vital problem. Any results in that direction from the project would be

 worthwhile.

All in all I rank this as number 2 in this group of proposals and strongly

 recommend its inclusion and I would be happy to manage it .