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Site: Toppan Printing Co., Ltd.
Electronic Media Bureau (EMB)
1, Kanda Izumi-Cho
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-0024, Japan
http://cpj.topica.ne.jp/toppan/index2.html
Date Visited: 25 March 1998
WTEC Attendess: M. Shamos (report author), T. Ager, B. Croft
Hosts:
Toppan is one of the largest printing companies in the world with 1997 revenue exceeding $10 billion. Founded in 1900, it regards the year 2000 as one of rebirth as the company shifts its emphasis from traditional paper printing to digitized multimedia. The Toppan philosophy is that it is not in the business of creating printed matter but of disseminating information through all available technologies, including print and image manipulation. Toppan plans for 20% of its revenue to be derived from multimedia by the year 2000, as opposed to 7% in 1998.
Toppan has a long history in digitized typesetting, including integration of text, graphics and photographs in an in-house prepress system developed over many years. To this technology it has added database, search and retrieval, data conversion and communications capability permitting it to add sound, animation and map data on demand. It sees its new markets as the Internet, database systems, systems integration, mediamixing and broadcasting. Toppan takes an expansive and advanced view of electronic publishing, the object of which, it believes, is not to make books digital but to do what books cannot, that is, create an immersive visual experience.
Dr. Kukimoto presented an overview of Toppan's Multimedia Division. Because of the Japanese writing system, printing and graphic arts in Japan present important cultural issues not found in Western publications. The appearance of a document or Web page is imbued with culture, customs and history conveyed through the arrangement of text and the appearance of written characters. Graphical expression must exhibit kansei, a largely untranslatable Japanese concept of "look and feel" combined with sense awareness. Toppan is extremely sensitive to kansei in its development efforts. Another important product design theme at Toppan is that the user must be able to control the medium with his own hands to give a sense of involvement and empowerment.
Toppan produces a full spectrum of digital products, including CD-ROM, CD-I, HDTV and DVD. It also produces television programs and maintains a complete digital editing studio.
Mr. Sakai explained Toppan's move from traditional printing to multimedia. Because of its expertise in high-quality print technology, including desktop publishing on 2,000 dpi monitors and design and advanced color management software, the company is well-poised to make the transition. Approximately 99% of Toppan's business is in Japanese and English, so the company is not exploring technology for other languages. Toppan believes that SGML will not become popular in Japan because of its complexity, but that XML may become a standard.
Mr. Oguro explained Toppan's entry into Internet services. As a graphic design and printing company, creation of customized Web pages is a natural extension of Toppan's business. Toppan entered the Internet domain by providing online service during the 1994 World Cup in Los Angeles. It then opened the first Internet shopping mall in Japan, which has 70 virtual stores and receives 100,000 visitors per day. Through its subsidiary, Cyber Publishing Japan, Toppan's goal in this arena is to create new media to bring its customers' messages to the public. It provides 3D chat rooms in which conversants are represented by avatars that move about in a virtual world. Of the 300-400 people in Toppan's Multimedia Division, about 10% are devoted to the Internet.
Mr. Takeda demonstrated Toppan's MAPION digital map service, a joint development with NTT and the largest Internet map service in Japan, with over 200,000 visitors per day. Almost half the residential territory of Japan is available through the system. Customers can advertise by having their logos appear on the maps in the appropriate location. For example, a bank might have its logo appear at each branch location. Maps with resolution down to 1 pixel per meter are provided. The Toppan map database can be used to produce paper maps or digital maps available through a variety of delivery services, all of which can be customized to individual needs.
A related offering is PHS, a personal positional location service. Through the use of low-power cell phones, the location of a particular telephone can be fixed to within approximately one block. A child can be provided with a functioning telephone that looks like a toy. If a parent wants to find the child's location, he can call the child and see where the child is on a map on the parent's home computer. Toppan's future plans include adding vertical, underground and multistory building data to the database.
Mr. Tarumi discussed Toppan's entry into packaged multimedia, including CD-ROM and DVD products. In an area replete with technical standards that must be followed, Toppan's advantage comes from improving product quality within the confines of the standards. For example, a troubling aspect of MPEG encoding is that viewed motion pictures suffer from "jitter," in which the image jumps in position slightly from frame to frame. Toppan demonstrated a system to remove jitter from MPEG-encoded video. It also has techniques for improving the shading and tone of JPEG images to make them more realistic.
Mr. Nishioka presented Toppan's Virtual Reality Gallery, which consists of a portion of a spherical screen in an auditorium giving a visual range side-to-side of 150 degrees, so the viewer is enveloped by the image being displayed by a digital projection system of resolution 3,500 x 1,000 lines. Toppan demonstrated a virtual reality tour through the Sistine Chapel that was created by taking still photographs from 50 different vantage points throughout the Chapel, digitizing them and using them to create a three-dimensional digital model. The viewer is able to move around within the Chapel by means of a hand-held game controller. It is possible to move in any direction and look at any angle, zooming in on any object in the room, including such ordinary items as the inside of a door jamb. The effect is electrifying-every member of the WTEC group was stunned by the demonstration. Each of the panel members who had visited the real Sistine Chapel found the Toppan Gallery visit to be more rewarding. It is possible to zoom up to the ceiling and lie on one's back, looking upward at God and Adam as Michelangelo did while he was painting. The striking commercial and educational opportunities presented by this technology were immediately apparent. Toppan estimates that it costs approximately $500,000 to create a virtual reality (VR) model of the scope of the Sistine Chapel and plans to do one each year for the foreseeable future. It is difficult to overstate how impressed the panel was with Toppan's virtual reality gallery. Its effect on the viewer is immediate and profound.
The VR gallery is Toppan's entry into digital museums. It is working on VR authoring tools and has plans for installations in more than 150 museums. Toppan managers believe that 3D VR will be the interface of choice for cyberspace.
Unlike many other companies visited on this trip, Toppan maintains close ties with universities, including Keio, Tokyo, Yamagato, the MIT Media Lab and Oxford University.