The sun rose, and didn't set

Yes, friends, this is the last article on my now-ended sabbatical journeys. And while the above title could well refer to my starting point in Finland, it actually alludes to my visits to Japan (the Land of the Rising Sun) and Britain (the Empire on which the Sun Never Set), along with a brief visit to Ireland. The contrast in HCI among these countries provides fitting closure to a year of discovery. Even to the unfocused tourist, Japan presents a striking mix of new and old. Long-held traditions are carried out by people riding bullet trains and talking (or as likely, thumb-keying) on the latest color-display mobile phones with far more bandwidth and features than I expect to see in the States this decade. In the same day, one can visit historic temples and shrines, and then partake of the Electric City (Akihabara)-a very active shrine to consumer technology. I had seen a handful of exciting papers and demos from Japan, and was eager to explore more of the environment that spawned them. I first visited the University of Tsukuba, located in a high-tech region outside of Tokyo. Here I saw how the traditional (in this case Mechanical Engineering) was applied to create the novel (Robotics, haptics, and display technology). I saw a remote-controlled robot wandering a museum exhibit, under the control of the curator, talking with visitors and pointing out features of the exhibit. I also saw a variety of wrap-around displays for immersive applications and a small omni-directional treadmill for more extensive virtual reality. Next, I traveled to ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research) near Kyoto where an international group of researchers is exploring a variety of new interactions and media. Animated agents gathered together to collaborate on behalf of their users. Media-rich spaces used perceptual techniques to control focus and information flow. And a variety of basic and applied research brought together issues of visual, audio, and linguistic processing. The following day I visited Osaka University and saw even more fun applications including a "magic table" that uses a simple but clever approach for multiuser VR with different people pointing into a common space from around a table. My final stop in Japan was Sony's Computer Science Laboratory. I had seen some of Jun Rekimoto's work at conferences , and in his invited talk at Interact 2001, so I was eager to see it in person. I wasn't disappointed. …