IEEE Spectrum February, 2014 - 43

gaDgets

view of his or her surroundings. For example,
if a user scanned a code on the front door of
the CSL office, the display showed the paths
to various meeting rooms and researchers'
offices as arrows on the floor.
Some of his experiments did go on to inform Sony's commercial products, like his
work with near-field communication, or
NFC. Nearly ten years later Sony introduced
electronic gear, including camera lenses and
speakers, that communicate with a smartphone via Rekimoto's NFC system.
Rekimoto thinks that a good user interface enhances human capacities, a view he
first heard expressed by Douglas Engelbart,
the inventor of the computer mouse. "He
said that the mouse was just a tiny piece of
a much larger project aimed at augmenting
the human intellect," Rekimoto remembers.
"So my work has become more about human
augmentation."

instant aviation: Jun rekimoto watches as
a volunteer controls a camera-equipped aerial
vehicle with intuitive motions of his head.

came back from a stint as a visiting scientist at the University of
Alberta, in Canada, he found himself in Japan's post-bubble economy. NEC and many of the other
big technology companies no
longer had big budgets for R&D.
In Canada, he had played
around with virtual-reality systems but had been disappointed with their unrealistic graphics.
A better approach, he thought,
would be to layer information
over the real world-a strategy
now called augmented reality.
But he knew such research would
be expensive and wouldn't pay
off in the short term, making it unlikely that NEC would support it.
So when he received an offer
to join Sony CSL, he jumped
photograph by Jeremie Souteyrat

JUn
REkIMOTO
IEEE member
age 52
What he Does
invents new ways
for humans and
machines to interact.
For Whom
Sony Computer
Science Laboratories
Where he
Does it
tokyo
Fun Factors
Has the freedom to
build whatever he
can dream up.

at the chance. He remembers
that CSL founder Mario Tokoro
warned him that the job wouldn't
be anything like working for one
of Japan's technology giants.
"Mario told me, 'You'll have freedom, but freedom is very hard,
freedom means responsibility-
there are no excuses,' " Rekimoto
recalls. He'd have to dream up
his own assignments and push
himself to complete them.
One of his earliest projects,
NaviCam, used a handheld
computer with a video camera,
something remarkably similar
to today's smartphones. With
this device, a user could scan
bar codes and the correlating
information would appear on
the screen, overlaid on the user's

one recent project, Flying Head, involves
a headset that the user wears to both see
through the eyes of and control a small unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV. "You wear
the headset and you feel that you can fly-
you can be a helicopter," he says. Rekimoto
imagines such a system being useful for a
nonpilot specialist who needs to access a
dangerous area, such as the ruins of Japan's
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
A UAV could fly above the radioactive rubble,
where wheeled robots would have difficulty
progressing, and the specialist guiding it
remotely could examine the damage from
a safe distance.
Even the grin-operated fridge fits into
Rekimoto's vision. That project, he explains,
also aims for human augmentation: By encouraging its users to smile more often, the
fridge can improve their mental well-being.
"If it is our destiny to merge with machines,
we should think about what parts of humans
can be augmented by that merger," he says.
"Technology shouldn't just improve our intellectual abilities-technology should make you
happy." Rekimoto and his fridge exchange
another smile. -eliza str ick l a nd

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum February, 2014