Overview: Designers can benefit from involving the user in the product development process. Understanding how users perceive products can help designers make decisions that better accommodate user needs. The integration of ABD and genetic algorithms (GAs) is proposed as a way to capture the perceptions from users in the form of affordance quality evaluations. This research investigates how thos...

Humans are able to come up with plans to achieve their goals, and to adapt these plans to changes in their environment, finding fixes, alternatives and taking advantages of opportunities without much deliberation. For example, they may use a tea kettle to water the plants, or a mug instead of a glass. Despite decades of research, artificial agents are not as robust or as flexible. In this work,...

We argue that a conceptual framework is required to support the practical evaluation of collaborative virtual environments. We propose such a framework based on an extended, three level concept of affordance. The application of the framework is illustrated by way of a case study. We conclude with some reflection on the framework’s effectiveness and identify areas where further tools or conceptu...

When interacting with the environment subjects tend to classify entities with respect to the functionalities they offer for solving specific tasks. The theory of affordances accounts for this agent-environment interaction, while similarity allows for measuring resemblances among entities and entity types. Most similarity measures separate the similarity estimations from the context—the agents, ...

Learning through self-exploration and imitation are crucial mechanisms in developing sensorimotor skills for human infants. In our previous work, we showed that a robot can self-discover behavior primitives and learn object affordances similar to infants. Then building predictive mechanisms at the affordance level allowed movement planning and simple goal-level imitation on our robot. The work ...

In this work we introduce the Aspect Transition Graph (ATG), an affordance-based model that is grounded in the robot’s own actions and perceptions. An ATG summarizes how observations of an object or the environment changes in the course of interaction. Through the Robonaut 2 simulator, we demonstrate that by exploiting these learned models the robot can recognize objects and manipulate them to ...

Previous research has shown facilitatory effects on attention and perception when object pairs are positioned for action compared to when they are not positioned for action. The present thesis aimed to better understand the mechanisms underlying this paired-object affordance effect. Chapters 2 and 3 showed that different but interacting parieto-frontal networks contribute to the effects of pair...

This paper presents a formal model for gameplay based upon the affordances available to the player that are linked to game objects. It has been constructed via an extensive analysis of major first-person games 1998-2008, although it is argued it may extend to all diegetic games. Gameplay can be understood as a network of allowed actions, that can be summarised as a small number of archetypal af...