When grasping an object, a robot must identify the available forms of interaction with that object. Each of these forms of interaction, a grasp affordance, describes one canonical option for placing the hand and fingers with respect to the object as an agent prepares to grasp it. The affordance does not represent a single hand posture, but an entire manifold within a space that describes hand p...

Current application of work system simulation in participatory ergonomics (PE) design includes a variety of different simulation media. However, the actual influence of the media attributes on the simulation outcome has received less attention. This study investigates two simulation media: full-scale mock-ups and table-top models. The aim is to compare, how the media attributes of fidelity and ...

A growing body of work in games research, both generative and analytic, seeks to characterize the relationship between a player’s understanding of an interactive narrative and her options for action within it. This paper provides several definitions that collectively serve as a basis for a model of the user’s comprehension of an unfolding story in a game. Central to this approach, we define the...

LearningVillages (LV) is an online game-based virtual learning environment. It aims at facilitating elementary students to pursue social inquiry learning and hence attain collaborative knowledge building (CKB). LV operates in the form of massively multi-player online role-play gaming. Different villages in this “virtual world” represent different societal issues. To embark on the development of...

When participants classify pictures of objects as upright or inverted with a left or right keypress, responses are faster if the response location (left/right) corresponds with the location of a handle (left/right) than if it does not. This result has typically been attributed to a grasping affordance (automatic activation of muscles associated with grasping the object with the ipsilateral hand...

‘Context-awareness’ could be one of the most desired fundamental abilities that a robot should have when sharing a workspace with humans co-workers. Arguably, a robot with appropriate context-awareness could lead to a better human robot interaction. In this paper, we address the problem of combining contextawareness with robotic path planning. Our approach is based on affordance-map, which invo...

Abstract Chronic pain is one of the most disabling medical conditions globally, yet, to date, we lack a satisfying theoretical framework for research and clinical practice. Over prior decades, several frameworks have been presented with biopsychosocial models as promising. However, in translation practice, these are often applied an overly reductionist manner, leaving much be desired. In partic...