J3J Episode 18: Virtual Yokohama Ramen I spent the last week at the triple event of the IEEE Virtual Reality 2001 Conference, the 2nd International Symposium on Mixed Reality and MiRai-01: Final Results of the MR Project, all in the airy confines of the Pacifico Yokohama conference center. The Pacifico is located in the Minato Mirai 21 (lit. Future Port) area of Yokohama, a recently constructed quarter of skyscrapers housing hotels and shopping malls, next to Sakuragicho station a bit to the north of the center of what has now become old Yokohama. Minato Mirai's top attraction is the self-effacingly named Landmark Tower, which at 70 stories currently holds the heavily-contested title of the tallest building in Japan. While the conference provided a convinient excuse to gorge on Chinese food and gawk at the scenery, the reason the lab paid the bill was that I was supposed to be learning about wearable computing and augmented reality -- which, I hasten to add in case some of my beloved sponsors should happen to read this, I did. Still, much of the conference was devoted to important but deadly dull stuff related to the meat and bones of virtual reality, ranging from new equations for blending in separate backgrounds for telepresence conferencing to bizarre Rube Goldberg contraptions for fooling humans in VR gear. I particularly liked a little device that provides haptic feedback (read: touch sensation) for virtual objects by moving a robot arm around. Let's say there's a virtual cube with a button in front of you, and you reach out your physical hand to touch it -- the robot hand will move to meet yours, so it feels as if the box really is there. More interesting, or at least more fun, was the MiRai-01 exhibition of the fruits of a year's work into actual projects involving virtual (entirely computer-generated) or mixed (computer & live) reality. The grand prize went to a work entitled "Contact Water", where 4 people wear VR goggles and a little position indicator/tilt sensor thingy on their hands. The software conjures up a pool of virtual water atop each rigged hand, with a fish swimming in the pool: you can move your hand around, tilt it and watch the water flow, move it up and down to make the fish jump in and out, and do a throwing motion to cause the fish to jump out of your hand into somebody else's pool! Utterly pointless, of course, and still a little clunky in practice, but still a remarkable demonstration of lots and lots of theory and number-crunching in practice, and a tantalizing hint of what the technology holds in the future... Other exhibits had you sit on a real chair and operate a virtual car, take a driving tour of virtual Yokohama, add virtual buildings to a real city, and lots of other useful-at-least-in-theory stuff. More amusing was the "SOUND-LENS" system, where you got to walk around a series of rooms filled with lights blinking at various frequencies, tilting a little optical lens/sensor your hand and hearing the input transformed into sound in realtime. And it wasn't just bleeps and burbles, since some of the LEDs were switching at 44 kHz, playing CDs. Still, it was a kick to be able to hear your own video image (at different refresh rates) and find out what a screensaver sounds like... But without a doubt the most commercially promising exhibits were, needless to say, virtual/mixed reality games. In one, the player was decked out with a VR helmet and a commando vest similar to the ones use in laser tag, and set in an actual concrete room. The plot wins no prizes for originality: a VR alien dropped out of the ceiling and attacked, and the player had to shoot it with his laser gun -- in other words, an immersive 3-dimensional game of Quake! The demo only had one scene available, but I would definitely pay to experience a full-length version. In the other game, two players got to operate virtual Power Rangers stomping around in the real scenery of Minato Mirai, climbing real buildings, blowing up virtual buildings and beating the pixels out of each other. Cute, but the implementation was a little buggy and once the novelty value wore off there wasn't really anything fundamentally different about it, just a pretty backdrop for a Street Fighter clone. Taking pictures of the MiRai exhibits was not allowed, but take a peek at their own site if the above strikes your fancy: http://www.mr-system.co.jp/MiRai-01/ And my own pictures of Yokohama and VR2001/ISMR can be found here: http://jpatokal.iki.fi/photo/travel/Japan/Kanto/Yokohama/ On the non-commercial side of things, the ARIEL lab at my own University of Tokyo had developed a "Virtual Chanbara" game allowing you to go sword-to-sword with virtual ninjas. Gear consisted of the requisite VR helmet and an odd-looking mallet with a spinning wheel inside, which you waved around as a sword. Whenever your virtual sword hit something, the wheel in the physical mallet would jolt to a stop, providing a surprisingly convincing sensation of actually having hit something. Playing the game was lots of fun, and some contestants got so into it that the researchers had to stop them from running off and snapping all the cables... But the conference wasn't all serious work like the above, there was also a reception, a banquet and a student volunteer party. At the banquet, Nth-generation Noh theater master Naohiko Umewaka first gave a rather bizarre speech attempting to relate the transmission of Noh art with computing, and then performed an even more bizarre (but fascinating) 5-minute modern Noh piece entitled "Coffee". The first 4 minutes were a motionless monologue in proper Noh style, the last minute was devoted to drinking virtual coffee and waving a silver spoon in the air. Exquisite? The student volunteer party was held at Shofukumon (招福門, "Gate for Inviting Luck"), a Chinese restaurant where the basic format was two hours, 17 dishes and all you could eat. I added shark fin dumplings and chicken feet to my repertoire, only to find out that neither tastes like much... On Saturday, the last (& dullest) day of the conference, I took half a day off and went to explore the less-explored parts of Yokohama. Near Shin-Yokohama station (read: far from anything else) is the Yokohama Ramen Museum, devoted to everybody's favorite Chinese noodle. I had thought the place was more or less a joke, and the displays upstairs tracing the evolution of Cup Noodles(tm) in excruciating detail seemed to confirm this, but the real raison d'etre -- and the reason the museum was absolutely packed at lunchtime on Saturday -- was the basement, containing a painstakingly constructed replica of a Japanese city in the year Showa 33 (or 1958 AD). Station ticketmasters practicing their clicking, posters for the latest Tora-san movie, a '58 love hotel offering a "rest" for 800 and a "stay" for 1500 yen... and, above all, 9 restaurants dealing out steaming bowls of noodles from all over the country. A bowl averaged 800-1000 yen, significantly higher than normal even not including the 300 yen museum entrance fee, but the place was packed, the restaurants had waiting times of up to 90 minutes -- and the stuff was *good*. I opted for the restaurant with the shortest queue, 新副菜館 (Shinfuku-saikan) offering Kyoto-style ramen which, as later consultation of the booklet informed me, consisted of "ordinary" noodles in "ordinary" soy broth. Ordinary it wasn't, being the 2nd-best ramen I've tasted in my life, and now I'll probably have to make the pilgrimage back solely to sample Okinawa-style salt ramen with special noodles or Hakata-style "Akamaru" pork ramen... sigh... entry Y300 for adults, closed Tuesdays, close to Shin-Yokohama JR and subway stations, about 15 minutes from Sakuragicho. Closer to home territory in Minato Mirai, NTT DoCoMo has a gigantic transmission tower masquerading as a office building, the ground floor of which features the remarkably vapid Yuudenchi (遊電地), a rather bad pun on "yuuenchi" (遊園地, amusement park) and "denwa" (電話, telephone). It has the standard complement of a 3D theater with a promotional movie about life in DoCoMoWorld in 2008, exhibits on the history of telecommunications, multimedia displays and bizarrely dressed chirpy female guides. And you actually have to pay Y100 to get in. More worth making a detour is the neighboring DoCoMo shop/product showcase, where you can play with live Java phones. Imagine: for an investment of only Y30,000, you too can play ports of 1970's arcade games on a screen half the size of your average business card! I'm still waiting for more innovative abuses of this technology to crop up... Last but not least, no less than 17 companies operating little parts of Tokyo's vast public transportation network have finally gotten their act together and introduced the new Passnet (パスネット) card, available in denominations of 1000, 3000 and 5000 yen, which can be used for travel on practically all forms of rail transport in the Tokyo/Yokohama metropolitan area... with the notable (and annoying) exception of JR trains. (JR has their own equivalent "iO Card" system, but it can only be used on JR trains. Sigh.) Once bought, you can just stick the card into the automated turnstiles and the correct fares will be magically deducted. The remaining amount is shown each time you use it and additionally printed on the back, along with a complete itinerary of used lines, stations and fares! So efficient, it's spooky. I plowed my way through several cards during the week-long conference and now I'm a convert. Plastic is fantastic!