Review of Kansei Research in Japan

Abstract

This article gives a historical review of Kansei-based media technologies in Japan. Kansei is a Japanese word, the meaning of which covers sensibility, sentiment, emotion, and feeling. Kansei research started in the field of music, because music is the most acceptable of the arts to computer science. In the 1990s, the applications of Kansei machine vision became widespread in many industrial fields, including electronic production, automobile manufacture, steel-making, the chemical industry, the food industry, and office appliances, among others. Kansei technologies are also applied to human interface systems, including the field of brain science, for human communication.