Aerial drawing interface for supporting an actual communication in face-to-face situation

This paper proposes a drawing system as an interface, which supports co-creative activities during actual communication in face-to-face situations. In such activities it is important to share a mutual context. And to share the context it is considered necessary to emerge as wholeness called "Ba" created through bodily action. With these points as background we have directed our attention to the act of drawing in squiggle method of psychotherapy and developed the prototype system enable to draw in the air as canvas. In order to draw in the air, we developed the prototype system that allows the users to see the real world with virtual line based on the trajectory of the fingertip motion. This drawing system provides a high portability for drawing anywhere, and the optical see-through display of this system considered as user's facial expression including eye gaze can be seen each other during communication for collaborative drawing. When we had a few subjects to draw using this system, most of the comments from the subjects were that a sense of drawing was scarce. This result probably shows the influence of haptic sense during the drawing in the air relatively small compared to the drawing on paper. In order to correct the defect, it considered to the users giving haptic information in addition to visual information for increasing a sense of drawing. And so we developed the prototype force feed back device that is attached to the user's hand, and integrated this device into the above drawing system. Consequently we set up a new system enable to make the users feel the sense of force during drawing activities.