Fumio Kishino

Fumio Kishino (岸野 文郎) is a Japanese engineer and researcher in virtual reality and human interfaces. With Paul Milgram, he co-authored the 1994 paper "A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays", which described a "virtuality continuum" running from completely real to completely virtual environments and grouped the displays between the two ends as mixed reality, with augmented reality as one of its classes. Microsoft's mixed reality documentation credits that paper with introducing the term. At the time, Kishino headed a research department at the ATR Communication Systems Research Laboratories in Kyoto Prefecture, where Milgram was an invited researcher in 1993-94.

Kishino spent 18 years at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone research laboratories working on image processing and visual communication before joining ATR in 1989. At ATR he promoted a project on teleconferencing with a strong sense of presence, which he later described as an application of VR technology to communications. He became a professor at Osaka University in 1996 and moved to Kwansei Gakuin University in 2010. He was president of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan (VRSJ) for the 2006 and 2007 fiscal years.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Checked career dates, ATR/NTT/Osaka/Kwansei Gakuin roles, VRSJ offices, awards and grants against the 1994 IEICE author biography, researchmap, the Kwansei Gakuin lab page, KAKEN, VRSJ officer lists, IVRC 2023 and his 2009 IIEEJ article, and paper details against Crossref/OpenAlex records, Microsoft Learn and Frontiers. About review dates.

Education and early career

According to the author biography printed with the 1994 IEICE paper, Kishino received B.E. and M.E. degrees from the Nagoya Institute of Technology in 1969 and 1971. His researchmap profile records both degrees in electronic engineering and a doctorate in engineering from the same institute.

In 1971 he joined the Electrical Communication Laboratories of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (now NTT), where, according to the 1994 biography, he worked on research and development of image processing and visual communication systems. His researchmap profile lists him as a researcher in the image communication research division from 1971 to 1987, and as a senior researcher at the NTT Human Interface Laboratories from 1987 to 1989.

Career

ATR Communication Systems Research Laboratories

Kishino joined the ATR Communication Systems Research Laboratories in mid-1989. He headed the laboratory's artificial intelligence department (知能処理研究室) from 1989 to 1996. The 1994 biography gives his research interests as 3D visual communication and image processing.

In a 2009 article, Kishino wrote that the Japanese word for a sense of presence, rinjōkan (臨場感), had been in use since around the time of the "teleconferencing with realistic sensations" (臨場感通信会議) project that he promoted at ATR from 1989 to 1996, and that he regarded that project as an example of VR technology applied to the communications field. His ATR papers of the period describe "virtual space teleconferencing", in which participants at different sites can feel as if they are at one site and work together.

With Haruo Takemura, Kishino presented "Cooperative work environment using virtual workspace" at the ACM CSCW '92 conference. The paper described a prototype in which two operators could directly grasp, move or release stereoscopic computer graphics objects by hand. It was built from head-position-tracked stereoscopic displays, hand gesture input devices and graphics workstations, and its stated design goal was a future teleconferencing system. A 1993 paper with Jun Ohya, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Takemura and Nobuyoshi Terashima at the IEEE VRAIS symposium reported an experimental system that rebuilt each participant at the receiving site as a texture-mapped wire-frame model. Tape marks on the face were tracked visually to capture facial expressions, while magnetic sensors and a data glove captured movements of the head, body, hands and fingers. A longer account, "Virtual Space Teleconferencing: Real-Time Reproduction of 3D Human Images", appeared in the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation in 1995.

Object manipulation in virtual environments was another topic. In a 1998 Presence paper, Kitamura, Amy Yee and Kishino proposed a manipulation aid that constrains the motion of a virtual object using faces selected by real-time collision detection. In their experiment, distance accuracy and completion time for a simple toy-building task in the virtual environment with the aid came close to those for the same task done with real objects.

Mixed reality taxonomy

Milgram, of the University of Toronto, was an invited researcher at the ATR Communication Systems Research Laboratories in 1993-94. "A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays" by Milgram and Kishino appeared in the December 1994 issue of IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, with Kishino listed as head of the Artificial Intelligence Department at the ATR laboratories. The paper placed real environments at one end of a "virtuality continuum" and virtual environments at the other, and called any environment between the two, in which real and virtual objects are presented together within a single display, a Mixed Reality (MR) environment. It treated augmented reality as the case in which an otherwise real environment is augmented with virtual objects, and named the converse case augmented virtuality. It also proposed a three-dimensional taxonomy for MR displays based on Extent of World Knowledge, Reproduction Fidelity and Extent of Presence Metaphor.

A companion paper by Milgram, Takemura, Akira Utsumi and Kishino, "Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum", was published in SPIE proceedings volume 2351, Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies. The framework is covered in detail in Reality-virtuality continuum.

Osaka University

Kishino became a professor at the Graduate School of Engineering of Osaka University in 1996, and in 2002 moved to the university's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology. His researchmap profile lists him in that school's Department of Multimedia Engineering. He was principal investigator on two Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), "A Study for Manipulation and Editing System with Multi Modal Interface" (fiscal years 1997-1999) and "Building Virtual Environment by using Objective Multi-modal Interface" (fiscal years 2000-2003).

During his time at Osaka University he co-authored several papers with Yoshifumi Kitamura on direct manipulation and shared 3D displays:

• Virtual chopsticks (IEEE Virtual Reality 1999): a virtual tool operated by the user's hand motion, captured by a hand gesture input device, with real-time collision tests between hand and tool and between tool and object. The authors reported that this helped in precise object alignment tasks.
• IllusionHole (SIGGRAPH 2001): a stereoscopic display that lets three or more people see individual stereoscopic image pairs from their own viewpoints. It uses an ordinary display covered by a mask with a hole in its centre; the system tracks each user's head and draws that user's images in an area of the screen that the mask hides from the other users, who all wear shutter glasses. A journal version appeared in the Journal of the Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers in 2003. The Interactive Content Design Lab at Tohoku University's Research Institute of Electrical Communication lists IllusionHole among its projects and lists both versions among its publications.
• ActiveCube (CHI 2001 extended abstracts): a set of connectable cubes with which a user builds and interacts with a 3D environment. The computer recognises the 3D structure of the connected cubes in real time through a communication network among them, and the cubes carry both input and output devices.

Kwansei Gakuin University

Kishino became a professor in the School of Science and Technology at Kwansei Gakuin University in 2010. His laboratory there, in the Department of Human System Engineering, describes its work as research on human-centred cognitive user interfaces, including interfaces that respond to the human senses. The 2023 organisation page of the Interverse Virtual Reality Challenge (IVRC) lists him as an IVRC Fellow and a guest professor at Kwansei Gakuin University.

Professional societies and awards

Kishino served on the board of directors of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan from fiscal 1997 to 2001, as vice-president from 2002 to 2005, as president in fiscal 2006 and 2007, and as an auditor in fiscal 2008 and 2009. As of the 2026 fiscal year, the society lists him among its special advisors, with the affiliation Kwansei Gakuin University. His researchmap profile also lists him as vice-president of the Human Interface Society (1999-2001), chair of the steering committee of the IEICE Human Communication Group (2000) and a councillor of the Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers (2001).

The same profile lists the following awards:

Year	Award
1993	Niwa-Takayanagi Award (paper award), Institute of Television Engineers of Japan
1994	Research Encouragement Award, Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence
1997	Best Paper Award, Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE)

Influence

Microsoft's mixed reality developer documentation states that the term "mixed reality" was introduced in the 1994 paper by Milgram and Kishino, and refers to the spectrum the paper called the "virtuality continuum" as the mixed reality spectrum. In a 2021 reassessment in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, Richard Skarbez, Missie Smith and Mary C. Whitton wrote that the paper "has been cited thousands of times, cementing it as one of the seminal works in our field", and proposed a new taxonomy of mixed reality experiences.

Selected publications

Year	Title	Co-authors	Venue
1992	Cooperative work environment using virtual workspace	Haruo Takemura	CSCW '92
1993	Real-time reproduction of 3D human images in virtual space teleconferencing	Jun Ohya, Yoshifumi Kitamura, Haruo Takemura, Nobuyoshi Terashima	IEEE VRAIS '93
1994	A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays	Paul Milgram	IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems
1994	Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum	Paul Milgram, Haruo Takemura, Akira Utsumi	SPIE vol. 2351
1995	Virtual Space Teleconferencing: Real-Time Reproduction of 3D Human Images	Jun Ohya, Yasuichi Kitamura, Nobuyoshi Terashima, Haruo Takemura, Hirofumi Ishii	Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation
1998	A Sophisticated Manipulation Aid in a Virtual Environment using Dynamic Constraints among Object Faces	Yoshifumi Kitamura, Amy Yee	Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
1999	Virtual chopsticks: object manipulation using multiple exact interactions	Yoshifumi Kitamura, T. Higashi, T. Masaki	IEEE Virtual Reality 1999
2001	Interactive stereoscopic display for three or more users	Yoshifumi Kitamura, Takashige Konishi, Sumihiko Yamamoto	SIGGRAPH 2001
2001	Real-time 3D interaction with ActiveCube	Yoshifumi Kitamura, Yuichi Itoh	CHI 2001 extended abstracts

See also

• Paul Milgram
• Reality-virtuality continuum
• Mixed reality
• Augmented virtuality