Below is a copy of the statement that will appear in the brochure of Keio University, Graduate School of Media Design. I would appreciate your feedback and comments.
Using Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media as an extension of man, interactive media includes all the various forms in which humans can extend our senses and brains into the world. It includes new technologies that allow us to facilitate this new communications, and to create natural and humanistic ways of interfacing with machines, as well as other people remotely over distances using the full range of human gestures such as touch, sight, sound, and even smell. Thus, new media includes new ways of communication between people, between cultures and races, between humans and machines, and between machines and machines. The vision of new media will bring about radical developments in every aspect of human lives in the form of new kinds of symbioses between humans and computers, new ways of communication between people, and new forms of social organization and interaction.
Traditional human communications has rich communication exchange using body gestures, the physical environment, and touch. Humans use all the senses simultaneously for environmental sensing, and emotional feeling communication. In the hyperconnected digital era, we thus need to create fundamentally new forms of media to connect humans in the physical world through the virtual world, through meaning and nonverbal communication to increase the sense of telexistence using all the senses. This will allow more opportunities for people to make meaningful exchanges using media in both the physical and virtual world.
I wish to develop new technologies related to multimodal sensing and actuation to give the user more definition in their augmented experience in the mixed reality environment. It is a field, which still presents great technical challenges.
To understand the new developments in media requires creativity and diversity in background and skills. Furthermore the most interesting problems in the 21st century are highly complex and are at the borders of disciplines. Therefore KMD is aptly placed to produce leaders in creative thinking for society.