Main Biography in Japanese
Michihiko Shoji is a researcher of Mixed Reality and Robotics, at the Venture Business Lab., Yokohama National University. He joined the VBL in April 2007, and restarted the "Utushiomi" project, a new vision of a Mixed Reality Humanoid Robot Interface. He seeks to change humanoid robots into "RealPlayer in Reality", so to speak, by adapting protean appearances of humans onto a humanoid robot using mixed reality technologies.
Mr. Shoji has presented his vision of "Utsushiomi: a Virtual Humanoid You Can Reach" at a variety of academic, video game industry, media art, and video game venues including ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM ASIAGRAPH, CEDEC, and NEXT, emphasizing that the humanoid robot projects requires entirely new concepts to bring them to production stage.
He started his career as a research assistant at Tohoku University in 2000. And prior to working for Yokohama National University, he worked for the Multimedia Laboratories of NTT DoCoMo as a researcher from 2003 to 2006. He unveiled the prototype of "Utsuhiomi" at the NTT Communication Expo at the end of 2005.
He received B. E. degree in mechanical engineering, M. E. and Ph. D. degrees in information sciences from Tohoku University, Japan, in 1994, 1996 and 2000, respectively. He was born in Hokkaido in 1970 and his first humanoid was a childhood snowman.
