JST Program for Creating New Industry from Universities / GAP Fund Program Step 1, Tongali Platform (2026) / Principal Investigator
Business Validation of Lighting Robots
This project validates the commercialization potential of Willuminations, a lighting robot system that gives light lifelike motion so that it can naturally attract human attention and influence behavior. Willuminations combines “Will” and “Illumination.” It is a swarm-controlled lighting system in which multiple suspended lighting robots move across multiple axes while coordinately changing the position, direction, motion, and rhythm of light. While conventional lighting has been equipment for statically brightening a space, this system changes its behavior according to the spatial context and production intent, using light itself as a moving medium within the space.
People instinctively pay attention to motion that evokes living things and to unpredictable changes more strongly than to static objects. By using this property, the system can create attention-guiding effects that cannot be achieved simply by adding video, audio, or text, and can increase the value of spatial experiences in exhibitions, events, retail stores, hotels, public spaces, and related environments. Multiple lights can move slowly as if breathing, turn as if welcoming visitors, or guide attention toward a specific exhibit, creating an experience in which the entire space seems to have intention. The project concept, “Make Space Breathe.”, expresses the idea of transforming space from a static container into a dynamic presence that acts on people.
The system also adopts a phase-free approach that uses the same equipment for everyday spatial staging and for evacuation guidance during disasters and emergencies. In normal operation, it enhances the appeal and brand value of a space as art or commercial staging. In an emergency, the lighting group can switch its direction and motion to intuitively indicate exits or safe movement directions. In this way, investment in spatial staging can also serve safety measures, proposing a new lighting infrastructure that functions in everyday use and during emergencies.
Through the GAP Fund Program, the project will improve the system, including the mechanism, swarm control, safe operation, installation, and removal methods for the lighting robots. It will also validate staging effects, attention-guiding effects, installability, maintainability, customer needs, and price acceptance, mainly in exhibition venues and commercial spaces. The project will work with partners in spatial design, exhibitions, and events, with the goal of offering an integrated package combining multiple robots and a control system. Ultimately, it aims to create a new industrial field that fuses lighting, robotics, and spatial computing to enhance both spatial experience and safety.
JST RISTEX (2023-2027) / Principal Investigator
A Preventive Model for Social Isolation and Loneliness through Connections between Service Mobility and Multi-Form Communities
This project aims to build a new preventive model for social isolation and loneliness from the perspective of mobility and social participation: where people can move, what services and activities they can encounter, and how they can connect with diverse communities in their region. With population aging, growth in single-person households, shortages of people who sustain local activities, and the contraction of public transportation and daily services, opportunities to go out and interact can decline, making it harder for people to maintain contact with others and society even while living in a community. At the same time, “service mobility,” such as mobile shops, mobile libraries, health-measurement vehicles, consultation support, and local events, can deliver necessary daily functions while also creating reasons for people to go outside, chance encounters, and light social interaction.
The research focuses on “multi-form communities,” including not only traditional local communities such as neighborhood associations and hobby groups, but also shops, events, online spaces, mobile services, and temporary gatherings. It studies mechanisms for connecting these communities with one another. Specifically, the project combines large-scale questionnaire surveys that capture loneliness, social networks, interests, daily behavior, mobility range, local participation, and personality tendencies with field experiments in local communities, and analyzes the relationships among social isolation and loneliness, mobility, activity opportunities, and community connection states.
The project also develops Community Compass, a system that positively recommends local shops, events, activities, and mobile services according to each person’s condition and interests. It is not designed to force behavior or identify and intervene in lonely people; rather, it supports people in noticing their own interests and possibilities and finding new choices for themselves. In field sites such as Oiso Town in Kanagawa Prefecture and Toshima City in Tokyo, municipalities, councils of social welfare, commerce and tourism stakeholders, local residents, private companies, and researchers are collaborating on demonstrations that combine health measurement, local events, service mobility, and online communities. The ultimate goal is to present a preventive social model that embeds diverse points of contact and entryways to participation into daily life, so that anyone can remain connected to local communities and society without strain, before isolation and loneliness become severe.
NEWS
Long-Term Field Trial at Toshima City’s New Public Health Center for Community Compass, an AI-Based Local Information System
Nagoya University will permanently install Community Compass, developed through the AmPlatea project, at Watashi Maintenance Lab, a health-promotion support hub inside Toshima City’s new public health center, and conduct a long-term demonstration from May 7, 2026 to March 31, 2027. By combining body-composition data measured with a body composition analyzer and local activity information, AI suggests local communities, activities, walking routes, and related options suited to each person.
This project builds an information platform for safely and securely generating, sharing, and interconnecting diverse “realities” that arise from physical spaces, virtual spaces, remote locations, individual bodily sensations and experiences, and cultural backgrounds. While the Internet of Things (IoT) has connected objects and environments in the real world to networks as data, the Internet of Realities (IoR) proposed in this research treats “reality” itself as a computational target: even the same facts or spaces can be perceived and interpreted differently depending on a person’s experiences, knowledge, culture, physical state, and context.
Advances in XR, wearable devices, sensors, robots, digital twins, and generative AI now allow people to visit remote places, share other people’s viewpoints and experiences, and experience environments that do not physically exist. At the same time, these technologies create risks that differ from those of conventional information systems, including information tampering, impersonation, privacy violations, loss of context, excessive guidance, unintended information sharing, and physical or psychological harm. This research aims not merely to pursue realism and convenience, but to realize a Trusted Inter-Reality Platform that incorporates reliability, safety, explainability, and each person’s intention and control.
The platform is organized around four functions: Reality Embedding, which converts real-world information into computable representations; Reality Hosting, which stores and presents diverse realities; Reality Networking, which safely connects multiple realities; and Reality Transformation, which transforms and mediates representations of reality according to users and purposes. To support these functions, the project studies mechanisms for verifying information provenance and modification history, context-aware access control, situation-adaptive confidentiality, dynamic consent management, and human-centered safety design. It also safely integrates video, audio, location, behavior, bodily information, and related data for presentation in virtual spaces and remote locations, while treating the influence of virtual-side operations and interventions on the physical world as an object of protection.
Through demonstrations in culture, tourism, education, communication, and related domains in Japan and abroad, the project examines whether people from different regions and cultural backgrounds can form mutual understanding and shared experiences while preserving their own realities. Rather than reproducing and sharing a single reality, the project aims to establish a next-generation information-society platform in which diverse realities coexist and can be connected and transformed when needed, while individual dignity, privacy, and choice are protected.
NEDO / Cabinet Office SIP Phase 2, Cyber-Space Infrastructure Technologies Using Big Data and AI: “Large-Area Human-Flow Understanding and Utilization through Programmable Federation of Heterogeneous Smart-City Platforms” (2019)
NICT commissioned research, proof-of-concept R&D for solving local issues through data linkage and utilization: “Construction of a Chubu Hospitality Platform for Vibrancy Creation, Safety, and Security” (2019-2020)
MIC Strategic Information and Communications R&D Promotion Programme (SCOPE): “R&D on Estimating Latent Social Needs Based on IoT and a Flexible Service Supply-Demand Exchange Platform” (2019-2020)
Horizon 2020 / NICT: R&D on a Public Big Data Utilization Platform through Collaboration with Europe, “BigClouT” (participating organizations: NTT East, NTT Laboratories, National Institute of Informatics, University of Tsukuba, Keio University, CEA-LETI, Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Lancaster University, and Absiskey) (2016-2018)
MIC G-Spatial x ICT Demonstration Project: G-Spatial Disaster Prevention Model “Resilient City Shonan” (Keio University, NTT East, Shonan Regional Urban Administration Council) (2014)
Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology: R&D on Data Integration and Analysis Technologies for Real-World Big Data Utilization (2014-)
NICT R&D on Social Big Data Utilization and Platform Technologies: A Social Big Data Utilization and Feedback Platform for Open Smart Cities (participating organizations: Keio University, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo Denki University, and NTT Communication Science Laboratories) (2014-2017)
FP7 / NICT: Joint R&D with Europe toward New-Generation Networks, “ClouT”; Japan-side technical coordinator (participating organizations: NTT East, NTT Laboratories, National Institute of Informatics, University of Tsukuba, Keio University, Panasonic System Networks, CEA-LETI, Engineering, University of Cantabria, and STMicroelectronics) (2013-2016)