Page 14 - Intelligent Communication Systems

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book is a direct result of over 10 years of research and education. My col-
leagues and I conceptualized a virtual-space teleconferencing system as a next-
generation video conference system more than 10 years ago at ATR Communication
Systems Research Laboratories, Kyoto. After that, I thought about a new concept
that would provide a more human-friendly environment, as if we had been in a real
world. In 1993 Professor John Tiffin of Victoria University of Wellington, New
Zealand, visited ATR and examined the system. He was greatly impressed by its
advances and tremendous possibilities. He had conducted distance education by
interconnecting the main campus of Victoria University and a satellite campus at
Taranaki. He was thinking about a more advanced distance education system. We
talked about the possibility of applying the concept of a virtual-space teleconfer-
encing system to distance education. After his visit to ATR, we started joint
research on a next-generation distance education system. In 1994I conceptualized
HyperReality as a new paradigm for telecommunications. In 1996, I moved to
Waseda University, Tokyo, as a full-time professor. I have focused on distance edu-
cation as a potential application of HyperReality.
As a next-generation distance education system, John and I conceptualized
HyperClass, by which a teacher and students, in reality their avatars, are brought
together via the Internet to hold a class as well as to do cooperative work as if

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