Smart objects are a representation strategy for games and virtual worlds, in which information about object interactions is distributed into the objects themselves: an object knows how it can be used, what kinds of effects it has, etc. In this work, we describe a prototype that aims to explore social simulation using smart objects. We extend the concept of smart objects to include a model of hu...

Article history: Received 19 June 2014 Received in revised form 19 December 2014 Accepted 23 December 2014 Available online 29 March 2015 This study explores the conceptual framing work of a group of upper secondary students as they first collaborate to understand a particular science museum exhibit, and then relate aspects of the exhibit to a larger scientific principle. The task involved prod...

Using hypersets as an analytic tool, we compare traditionally Gibsonian (Chemero 2003; Turvey 1992) and representationalist (Sahin et al. this issue) understandings of the notion ‘affordance’. We show that representationalist understandings are incompatible with direct perception and erect barriers between animal and environment. They are, therefore, scarcely recognizable as understandings of ‘...

With increases in access to powerful computing and high-speed networks, 3D virtual learning environments are being envisioned and developed as places for collaborative learning. These new environments for collaborative learning have promise for great authenticity in experience, great presence with others, and the monitoring/sensing of broad ranges of human cognition and behavior inferred from t...

Through our research on natural ICT solutions for integration into a non-ICT based workflow at a Brazilian chronic care hospital, we created a new design process and two additional HCI design criteria for maintaining natural work processes using information and communication technologies (ICT). For our HCI design we propose two design pathways: 1. iterating on adoption of designed technologies ...

The lack of precise models to support the design and analysis of social inclusion systems, and the growing informatization of the society which connects digital to social inclusion in multiple ways, lead to the need of exploring in full the potential of information technology to support social inclusion. However, this potential can only be achieved if we can rely on precise models that can be u...

to have any psychological validity. Further work is called for, and we suspect a fertile area will be in defining homomorphisms between the groups of different system representations: for example, between the physical user interface and the structure of the transition system ‘underneath’ it. There is also a mischief element in human nature that our examples can highlight as another form of affo...

As virtual cities become ever more common and more extensive, the need to populate them with virtual pedestrians grows. One of the problems to be resolved for the virtual population is the behaviour simulation. Currently specifying the behaviour requires a lot of laborious work. In this paper we propose a method for automatically deriving the high level behaviour of the avatars. We introduce to...

A novel mechanism is introduced by which a robot can connect the general notion of an affordance of an object to specific behaviors by which the robot can achieve the desired action. We achieve this by decomposing an affordance-drive behavior into three components. We first define controllers that specify how to achieve a desired change in object state through changes in the agent’s state. For ...