Hirokazu Kato
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Hirokazu Kato is a computer scientist and professor at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan, best known as the original developer of ARToolKit, an open-source marker-tracking library for building augmented reality applications that NAIST describes as standard software used around the world.[1][2][3] Trained in pattern recognition and computer vision, he began working on augmented reality in 1998 as a visiting scholar at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) of the University of Washington, where he and Mark Billinghurst created ARToolKit and described its marker tracking and head-mounted display calibration methods in a 1999 paper.[2][3][4]
Kato received the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award in 2009, a Lasting Impact Award with Billinghurst at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) in 2012 for their 1999 paper, and the ISMAR Career Impact Award in 2023.[2][5][6] Since April 2023 he has been an executive director and vice president of NAIST; his current term runs from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2027.[7]
Early life and education
Kato studied at Osaka University, which awarded him a B.E. in 1986, an M.E. in 1988 and a Dr. Eng. degree in 1996.[2] According to NAIST's official biography, he graduated from the university's School of Engineering Science in March 1986 and completed the master's course of its Graduate School of Engineering Science in March 1988; the doctorate is dated January 1996.[7] In an essay written after he was named a fellow of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE), Kato wrote that he left the Osaka doctoral program in 1989 after one year to take up a post as an assistant.[8]
Career
Osaka University and computer vision
Kato was an assistant in Osaka University's Faculty of Engineering Science from April 1989 to March 1996 and a lecturer there from April 1996 to March 1999.[7] His research background was in pattern recognition and computer vision.[2]
HIT Lab and the origin of ARToolKit
In 1998 Kato spent about a year abroad under the Ministry of Education's overseas researcher program. In his IEICE essay he recalled that Seiji Inokuchi, the professor of his laboratory, opposed his first choice, Takeo Kanade's laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, and told him to find a place that would give his research a new direction. He emailed a number of well-known researchers, received a reply from Thomas Furness of the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory, and chose the HIT Lab, which had no vision researchers but needed someone with that background. There he met Mark Billinghurst, then a student, who asked him to help with his augmented reality research; Kato described the collaboration as a major turning point in his career.[8][2]
The HIT Lab's ARToolKit history page dates the toolkit to 1999, when Kato arrived at the lab, and states that it was first demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 1999 for the Shared Space project. The page names Kato and Billinghurst as the original creators of ARToolKit.[9]
Kato and Billinghurst described the underlying methods in "Marker tracking and HMD calibration for a video-based augmented reality conferencing system", presented at the 2nd IEEE and ACM International Workshop on Augmented Reality (IWAR'99). Kato was by then listed at Hiroshima City University.[4] The HIT Lab lists the paper among its ARToolKit publications.[10] The paper presented a conferencing prototype in which remote collaborators appeared as live video on "Virtual Monitors" attached to small marked cards, along with a shared virtual whiteboard drawn on a larger marked board with an LED light pen. The user wore a Virtual i-O i-glasses head-mounted display fitted with a small color camera, connected to an SGI O2 computer, and the system ran at 7 to 10 frames per second with the whiteboard and 10 to 15 frames per second without it.[4]
The tracking method used square fiducial markers of known size. After thresholding the camera image, the software extracted regions whose outlines could be fitted by four line segments, normalized the region inside each square, and identified it by template matching against patterns registered in advance. It then estimated the transformation from marker coordinates to camera coordinates, giving the camera's position and orientation relative to the marker. The paper also proposed a calibration method for optical see-through head-mounted displays based on the same marker tracking.[4]
ARToolKit was released under a dual-license model: versions 1.0 through 2.x were available free for non-commercial use under the GNU General Public License, while ARToolworks, Inc. of Seattle managed proprietary licenses for commercial use.[11] ARToolworks was founded in 2001 to offer commercial services for ARToolKit; it was acquired by DAQRI in 2015, which said it would release ARToolKit's commercial Pro tools under an open-source license.[12] The AWE XR Hall of Fame credits ARToolKit with addressing viewpoint tracking and virtual object interaction for early AR developers, and notes that it later supported mobile platforms including Symbian, iOS and Android.[3]
Hiroshima City University
From April 1999 to March 2003 Kato was an associate professor in the Faculty of Information Sciences at Hiroshima City University.[7] Working with Billinghurst and others, he extended the marker-based approach to tabletop and book-based interfaces. A 2000 paper by Kato, Billinghurst, Ivan Poupyrev, K. Imamoto and K. Tachibana at the IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality (ISAR 2000) described a vision-based tracking method for tabletop AR that still returned camera viewpoint information when users covered some of the tracking markers, together with tangible interaction techniques; the authors built a prototype virtual interior design application in which users moved virtual furniture with a real paddle.[13]
Kato was also a co-author of the MagicBook, a mixed reality interface in which a real book with marked pages showed 3D virtual scenes that a reader could then enter as immersive virtual reality, allowing movement along the reality-virtuality continuum. Its head tracking used the ARToolKit library, and the software was first shown at SIGGRAPH 2000, where, according to the authors, more than 2,500 people tried it over a week.[14] Billinghurst and Kato also published an overview article, "Collaborative augmented reality", in Communications of the ACM in July 2002.[15]
Return to Osaka and move to NAIST
Kato returned to Osaka University as an associate professor in the Graduate School of Engineering Science from April 2003 to March 2007.[7] In 2003 he and colleagues presented MagicCup, a tangible interface for manipulating virtual objects in tabletop augmented reality, at the IEEE International Augmented Reality Toolkit Workshop.[16]
In April 2007 he became a professor in NAIST's Graduate School of Information Science.[7] He is the professor of the Interactive Media Design Laboratory in the Division of Information Science of NAIST's Graduate School of Science and Technology.[17] His listed research keywords include augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality, human interfaces and image processing.[17] Work from the laboratory includes "EyeAR: Refocusable Augmented Reality Content through Eye Measurements", by Damien Constantine Rompapas, Kato and others, which won the Best Demo Award at ISMAR 2016 in Merida, Mexico.[18]
University administration
At NAIST Kato has held a series of administrative posts alongside his professorship.[7] In April 2021 he moved to the university's Center for Digital Green-innovation, where, according to a 2021 conference biography, he began interdisciplinary research on social problems such as the Sustainable Development Goals.[19] NAIST announced his appointment as an executive director and vice president in June 2023.[1]
| Period | Position |
|---|---|
| April 2007 to March 2018 | Professor, Graduate School of Information Science, NAIST |
| April 2010 to March 2011 | Assistant to the President, NAIST |
| April 2013 to March 2017 | Vice Dean, Graduate School of Information Science, NAIST |
| April 2017 to March 2021 | Director of the Information Initiative Center and Director of the University Library, NAIST |
| April 2018 to March 2021 | Professor, Graduate School of Science and Technology, NAIST |
| April 2021 to March 2023 | Professor, Center for Digital Green-innovation, and Assistant to the President, NAIST |
| April 2023 to present | Executive Director and Vice President, NAIST |
As of NAIST's April 2025 officer list, his responsibilities as vice president cover education, student support, campus digital transformation, regional collaboration, human rights and harassment matters, public relations, scholarly information, information systems and information management.[7]
Awards and recognition
| Year | Award | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) | Awarded March 2009[2][20][18] |
| 2009 | Nikkei BP Technology Award | April 2009[18] |
| 2011 | CEDEC AWARDS 2011 (Programming, Development Environment) | September 2011[18] |
| 2012 | 10 Years Lasting Impact Award, ISMAR 2012 (Atlanta) | Shared with Mark Billinghurst for "Marker Tracking and HMD Calibration for a Video-Based Augmented Reality Conferencing System"[5][18] |
| 2014 | Fellow, Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers | Conferred at the IEICE Society Conference at Tokushima University in September 2014[8] |
| 2016 | Best Demo Award, ISMAR 2016 (Merida) | Co-author of "EyeAR: Refocusable Augmented Reality Content through Eye Measurements"[18] |
| 2023 | ISMAR 2023 Career Impact Award (Sydney) | October 2023[6][18] |
Kato is also listed in the AWE XR Hall of Fame maintained by the Augmented World Expo.[3]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "奈良先端科学技術大学院大学の理事・副学長に加藤博一教授が就任". SENTAN WEB MAGAZINE. Nara Institute of Science and Technology. 2023-06-12. https://www.naist.jp/publications/sentan/WEB/special/special_10.html. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 "Hirokazu Kato". Interactive Media Design Laboratory, Nara Institute of Science and Technology. https://imdl.naist.jp/people/hirokazukato/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Hirokazu Kato". AWE XR Hall of Fame. Augmented World Expo. https://www.awexr.com/hall-of-fame/17-hirokazu-kato. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Hirokazu Kato, Mark Billinghurst (1999). "Marker tracking and HMD calibration for a video-based augmented reality conferencing system". Proceedings 2nd IEEE and ACM International Workshop on Augmented Reality (IWAR'99), pp. 85-94. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/IWAR.1999.803809. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "ISMAR - Past Symposiums". IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. https://www.ismar.net/past_symposiums/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "ISMAR 2023 - Sydney, Australia". IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. https://www.ismar.net/posts/ismar2023/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 "役員等紹介 (Executives)". Nara Institute of Science and Technology. https://www.naist.jp/about/president/officer/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 加藤博一 (Hirokazu Kato). "優れた研究者に囲まれていたという幸運 (The good fortune of being surrounded by excellent researchers)". IEICE Information and Systems Society Journal, vol. 19, no. 4. Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ieiceissjournal/19/4/19_19/_pdf/-char/ja. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ "ARToolKit Documentation (History)". Human Interface Technology Laboratory, University of Washington. https://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/documentation/history.htm. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ "ARToolKit Publications". Human Interface Technology Laboratory, University of Washington. https://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/publications/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ "ARToolKit licensing". Human Interface Technology Laboratory, University of Washington. https://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/license.html. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ Frederic Lardinois (2015-05-13). "DAQRI Acquires AR Pioneer ARToolworks". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/13/daqri-acquires-ar-pioneer-artoolworks/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ H. Kato, M. Billinghurst, I. Poupyrev, K. Imamoto, K. Tachibana (2000). "Virtual object manipulation on a table-top AR environment". Proceedings IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Augmented Reality (ISAR 2000), pp. 111-119. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISAR.2000.880934. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ Mark Billinghurst, Hirokazu Kato, Ivan Poupyrev (2001-10). "The MagicBook: a transitional AR interface". Computers & Graphics, vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 745-753. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0097-8493(01)00117-0. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ Mark Billinghurst, Hirokazu Kato (2002-07). "Collaborative augmented reality". Communications of the ACM, vol. 45, no. 7, pp. 64-70. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/514236.514265. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ H. Kato, K. Tachibana, M. Tanabe, T. Nakajima, Y. Fukuda (2003). "MagicCup: a tangible interface for virtual objects manipulation in table-top augmented reality". 2003 IEEE International Augmented Reality Toolkit Workshop. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ART.2003.1320434. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 "加藤 博一 (Hirokazu Kato)". researchmap. https://researchmap.jp/read0107470. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5 18.6 "Awards". Interactive Media Design Laboratory, Nara Institute of Science and Technology. https://imdl.naist.jp/awards/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ "Dr. Hirokazu KATO". Japan-Taiwan Symposium 2021. Fu Jen Catholic University. https://jtresearch-2021.fju.edu.tw/speaker/dr-hirokazu-kato. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
- ↑ "Virtual Reality Technical Awards". IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on Visualization and Graphics. https://tc.computer.org/vgtc/awards/virtual-augmented-reality-technical-awards/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.