I drove to Maizuru, a small city 230km away from home. The driving was more or less boring as the half of the route was already familiar to me and the latter half was all through mountains and hills. I had to drive myself because I needed to take machines, devices, cables, etc. The destination was a care institution called Gracewill Maizuru. One of our colleagues had been actively involved in the education system and some other activities including the dance performance, anthropology cafe, and so on. With the close relationship with the institution, we intended further to extend our activity to an experimental level. We were going to bring in a small humanoid called telenoid, which was supposed to convey a sense of existence to the user. They key concept is the bodily communication, for which I had took part in the project. I thus took a motion capture system to the place.

It only took an hour to set up the machinery, which was a relief. I was certain that the person who took care of us was puzzled seeing me placing those funny objects on the flour. More puzzlement was however to come later when another guy brought in the humanoid to the institution. We took part in the anthropology cafe, where we heard of a travel by our colleagues, who had been to Okinawa, the border islands in the south of Japan. The talk lasted about an hour and half. Then came in the telenoid. I was curious to see how they would react to it, but to my surprise, it was welcomed by most of the participants. I am not sure whey it was the case, but it was not bad at all.

The motion capture environment was set up in a room

The humanoid was heartily welcomed

Wearing a pair of glasses was so effective to remind the user of the person whom she was talking to