CHAPTER 11

Research History

FMPS + VRAIO did not appear out of nowhere. It is the result of more than 20 years of research, begun in 2002, on community watching-over and on mechanisms to prevent its misuse.

Timeline

2002　The e-JIKEI Network concept: ordinary households watch over the public space in front of their homes using common PCs and inexpensive cameras — not for themselves, but for the safety of the community.
2004–2005　Community-security software for PCs distributed free of charge. From 2005, a community trial with 30 cameras at 20 homes in a district of about 300 households in Maebashi City.
Later　From home cameras to many inexpensive stand-alone cameras, encrypted recording, and systems suited to organised introduction by municipalities.
In parallel　Research on privacy protection, covering not only unauthorised access from outside but also misuse by legitimate administrators: encryption, access control, disclosure of camera operating status, and complete recording of viewing history.
2009　Announcement of the "e-JIKEI Light", an LED security light with a built-in camera, jointly developed by four parties: the NPO e-JIKEI Network Promotion Institute, TOSTEC Co., Ltd., ROCKY Co., Ltd. and the Faculty of Engineering, Gunma University. An all-in-one design needing no PC, it runs on the security light's power supply and stores about the last week of images, encrypted, on a built-in memory card. Decryption requires a release password and a PC with dedicated software. The expected retail price was ¥50,000–70,000, comparable to the cost of installing a security light alone. TOSTEC went on to manufacture and sell it, and later independently developed and now sells a second-generation model.
Later　Field trials of the e-JIKEI Net Camera in Kiryu City. Footage is stored encrypted in each camera, viewing requires a permission code issued by a recording server, and every viewing is made public — the prototype of VRAIO, implemented as a working system.
2016　Explicit proposal that every streetlight may come to have network cameras.
AI era　VRAIO. The long-standing concern with accountable use of information develops into a mechanism governing for what purpose, and under what auditable rules, information generated by AI may leave a system.
2026　Publication of a paper combining FMPS and VRAIO and examining social acceptance, with coverage density and continuous tracking as central design requirements.

Field trials and demonstrations

Field trials of the e-JIKEI Net Camera were carried out in Kiryu City, Gunma Prefecture, at a monthly car park, tenant buildings, homes and a welfare facility. The system works as follows:

Footage is stored encrypted inside each camera.
Viewing footage requires a permission code issued by the recording server.
The recording server records the viewer, camera, image file and time of issue, and makes the viewing record public.

Demonstrations show, as sequences of screenshots from the viewing terminal, how a target is followed by switching cameras — and how the process of obtaining viewing permission from the recording server is published on the internet. There are two examples of good use and one of misuse:

Commercialisation: the "e-JIKEI Light", an LED security light with a built-in camera (2009 press release (PDF, Japanese)). The current product is the e-JIKEI Light, new model (TOSTEC Co., Ltd., Japanese). Building cameras into streetlights (security lights) with encrypted recording has already been realised as a product.

List of field-trial sites: e-JIKEI Net Camera field trials | Example: Suehiro Mirai Parking (Suehiro-cho, Kiryu City)
e-JIKEI Door-Phone social experiments with neighbourhood associations: list of social experiments (pages in Japanese)

Main papers

FMPS + VRAIO

Y. Fujii, "Governing AI Outputs in a Fully Sensed Society: Is Output Governance Sufficient for Social Acceptance?", Smart Cities, Vol. 9, No. 10, Art. 167, 2026. Paper
Y. Fujii, "No trust without trust infrastructure: The extended Kelvin principle and its application to AI output governance", AI, Vol. 7, No. 6, Art. 218, 2026. doi:10.3390/ai7060218
Y. Fujii, "VRAIO as a safety valve: Governing AI platform outputs at societal scale", AI and Ethics, Vol. 6, Art. 340, 2026. doi:10.1007/s43681-026-01206-z
Y. Fujii, "Verifiable record of AI output for privacy protection: Public space watched by AI-connected cameras as a target example", AI & Society, Vol. 40, pp. 3697–3706, 2025. doi:10.1007/s00146-024-02122-8

Earlier work

Y. Fujii, N. Yoshiura and N. Ohta, "Creating a worldwide community security structure using individually maintained home computers: The e-JIKEI Network Project", Social Science Computer Review, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 250–258, 2005. doi:10.1177/0894439304273274
Y. Fujii, K. Maru, K. Kobayashi, N. Yoshiura, N. Ohta, H. Ueda and P. Yupapin, "e-JIKEI Network using e-JIKEI Cameras: Community security using considerable number of cheap stand-alone cameras", Safety Science, Vol. 48, No. 7, pp. 921–925, 2010. doi:10.1016/j.ssci.2010.03.018
Y. Fujii, N. Yoshiura, N. Ohta, A. Takita, H. Ueda and K. Maru, "Abuse Prevention of Street Camera Network by Browsing-History Disclosure", Journal of Community Informatics, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 152–156, 2016. doi:10.15353/joci.v12i1.3216
Y. Fujii and N. Yoshiura, "Will every streetlight have network cameras in the near future?", Science, eLetter, 21 October 2016. eLetter

Residential streetlights linked like a net, covering public space

Dense coverage by streetlights

Funding

JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Research (Exploratory) 26K21972, "Reconstructing Ethical Principles and Developing Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Defending Democracy in the AGI Era"

Press release: English press release (PDF) | Japanese press release (Gunma University website)

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FMPS + VRAIO: Public-safety infrastructure built on streetlights, and the governance of AI outputs | Yusaku Fujii (Gunma University) and NPO e-JIKEI Network Promotion Institute
This site presents a research-stage concept; all figures are estimates.