A Saga University professor has repeatedly coauthored e-learning and virtual reality research with MGM researchers, a recurring coauthorship rather than a signed partnership.
Kohei Arai, a professor at Saga University in Japan, has coauthored research with MGM's Herman Tolle, Aryo Pinandito, and Eriq M. A. Jonemaro for over a decade, a working relationship that runs through shared academic interests rather than a formal agreement between the two universities.
The collaboration traces back to around 2014 and 2015, when the two groups worked together on e-learning and virtual reality research. One paper from that period, "Virtual Reality Game Controlled with User's Head and Body Movement Detection Using Smartphone Sensors," carries all four names, Tolle, Pinandito, Jonemaro, and Arai, and describes a smartphone based virtual reality game that a player controls by walking, turning, and moving their head while wearing a simple cardboard headset, rather than by pressing buttons. The work fit naturally alongside Tolle's long running interest at MGM in delivering virtual reality through ordinary smartphones instead of specialized hardware.
MGM keeps an internal registry of its publications, and this particular collaboration is documented there. A live public copy of the paper was not reachable while preparing this article, so its precise venue and page numbers are reported here based on how the paper is catalogued across academic indexes rather than from a copy read directly. What is clear and worth stating plainly is the shape of the relationship: a multi year pattern of coauthorship between Arai at Saga University and Tolle's group at MGM, centered on e-learning and virtual reality research, not an institutional partnership between the two universities.
Saga University is a national university on Japan's Kyushu island, with faculties spanning science and engineering, agriculture, medicine, and education. Arai himself is known for coauthoring widely with universities across Southeast Asia on topics in remote sensing, computer vision, and applied information science, of which the work with MGM is one long running example.
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Linkmgm.ub.ac.id/index.php/mgm/home/publication (opens in a new tab)Linkresearchgate.net/publication/285614376_Virtual_reality_game_controlled_with_user (opens in a new tab)
For MGM, the tie to Saga University shows how a lab's research network can grow through one prolific coauthor's interests rather than a top down agreement, with individual projects accumulating over years into a genuine, if informal, working relationship.
