Design technology that was said to surpass that of NASA

We spent two years developing automatic tracking for rockets, something that was requested by Professor Tsuneyoshi Uemura of Tokyo University, and after many hardships we succeeded in creating a prototype. This XY tracker was able to flawlessly track the rocket immediately after launch, and observers visiting from America praised it highly, saying that it was the most advanced device of anything that they had seen at the Uchinoura test facility. At that time, even NASA was using photographic strip film for orbital tracking of rockets, and the XY tracker was truly an epochal device. It provided the opportunity for us to take part in space development projects such as cameras for observing the aurora borealis and cameras for the "Suisei", the probe tracking Halley's comet.

Image measurement technology: The vision of an ophthalmologist

Tetsu Ishikawa, a lecturer at the Tokyo University Faculty of Medicine, thought that if a device were developed that made it possible to accurately measure changes in the surface area of the iris closely related to autonomous nervous system functions, it would be the first such device in the world to be able to do so, and he came to us to see if we could develop it. The development of this "Iriscoder" not only required that we focus everything on improving the product precision, as we had in the past, but also required that we take on a field that was completely unknown to us. That was the field of medical equipment manufacturing, which included camera performance, the convenience of use for physicians, taking the psychological state of the subject into consideration, and other elements with which we were unfamiliar. This device was used to study adaptation of the eye to darkness and brightness when entering and driving through tunnels, and the results of those experiments are still at work today in expressway tunnel illumination.