Learning to play in digital games

There is growing interest in the use of games for educational purposes, particularly with regard to teaching curriculum subjects. Much of the research however has focused either on the content of games or the learning theory they illustrate. This paper presents a methodology that allows for an examination of how players learn to play. An understanding of this process is arguably crucial for incorporating games into educational systems. Three case studies are presented that illustrate the application of this method. We also evaluate its usefulness and limitations. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues in researching learning from games, and suggestions for how research methods in this area might be developed

Human-centered Electric Prosthetic (HELP) Hand

Through a partnership with Indian non-profit Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti, we designed a functional, robust, and and low cost electrically powered prosthetic hand that communicates with unilateral, transradial, urban Indian amputees through a biointerface. The device uses compliant tendon actuation, a small linear servo, and a wearable garment outfitted with flex sensors to produce a device that, once placed inside a prosthetic glove, is anthropomorphic in both look and feel. The prosthesis was developed such that future groups can design for manufacturing and distribution in India

3D gaze cursor: continuous calibration and end-point grasp control of robotic actuators

© 2016 IEEE.Eye movements are closely related to motor actions, and hence can be used to infer motor intentions. Additionally, eye movements are in some cases the only means of communication and interaction with the environment for paralysed and impaired patients with severe motor deficiencies. Despite this, eye-tracking technology still has a very limited use as a human-robot control interface and its applicability is highly restricted to 2D simple tasks that operate on screen based interfaces and do not suffice for natural physical interaction with the environment. We propose that decoding the gaze position in 3D space rather than in 2D results into a much richer spatial cursor signal that allows users to perform everyday tasks such as grasping and moving objects via gaze-based robotic teleoperation. Eye tracking in 3D calibration is usually slow - we demonstrate here that by using a full 3D trajectory for system calibration generated by a robotic arm rather than a simple grid of discrete points, gaze calibration in the 3 dimensions can be successfully achieved in short time and with high accuracy. We perform the non-linear regression from eye-image to 3D-end point using Gaussian Process regressors, which allows us to handle uncertainty in end-point estimates gracefully. Our telerobotic system uses a multi-joint robot arm with a gripper and is integrated with our in-house GT3D binocular eye tracker. This prototype system has been evaluated and assessed in a test environment with 7 users, yielding gaze-estimation errors of less than 1cm in the horizontal, vertical and depth dimensions, and less than 2cm in the overall 3D Euclidean space. Users reported intuitive, low-cognitive load, control of the system right from their first trial and were straightaway able to simply look at an object and command through a wink to grasp this object with the robot gripper

OPTIMIZATION OF FEATURE SELECTION IN A BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE SWITCH BASED ON EVENT-RELATED DESYNCHRONIZATION AND SYNCHRONIZATION DETECTED BY EEG

There are hundreds of thousands of people who could benefit from a Brain-Computer Interface. However, not all are willing to undergo surgery, so an EEG is the prime candidate for use as a BCI. The features of Event-Related Desynchronization and Synchronization could be used for a switch and have been in the past. A new method of feature selection was proposed to optimize classification of active motor movement vs a non-active idle state. The previous method had pre-selected which frequency and electrode to use as electrode C3 at the 20Hz bin. The new method used SPSS statistical software to determine the most significant frequency and electrode combination. This improved method found increased accuracy in classifying cases as either active or idle states. Future directions could be using multiple features for classification and BCI control, or exploiting the difference between ERD and ERS, though for either of these a more advanced algorithm would be required

To Draw or Not to Draw: Recognizing Stroke-Hover Intent in Gesture-Free Bare-Hand Mid-Air Drawing Tasks

Over the past several decades, technological advancements have introduced new modes of communication with the computers, introducing a shift from traditional mouse and keyboard interfaces. While touch based interactions are abundantly being used today, latest developments in computer vision, body tracking stereo cameras, and augmented and virtual reality have now enabled communicating with the computers using spatial input in the physical 3D space. These techniques are now being integrated into several design critical tasks like sketching, modeling, etc. through sophisticated methodologies and use of specialized instrumented devices. One of the prime challenges in design research is to make this spatial interaction with the computer as intuitive as possible for the users. Drawing curves in mid-air with fingers, is a fundamental task with applications to 3D sketching, geometric modeling, handwriting recognition, and authentication. Sketching in general, is a crucial mode for effective idea communication between designers. Mid-air curve input is typically accomplished through instrumented controllers, specific hand postures, or pre-defined hand gestures, in presence of depth and motion sensing cameras. The user may use any of these modalities to express the intention to start or stop sketching. However, apart from suffering with issues like lack of robustness, the use of such gestures, specific postures, or the necessity of instrumented controllers for design specific tasks further result in an additional cognitive load on the user. To address the problems associated with different mid-air curve input modalities, the presented research discusses the design, development, and evaluation of data driven models for intent recognition in non-instrumented, gesture-free, bare-hand mid-air drawing tasks. The research is motivated by a behavioral study that demonstrates the need for such an approach due to the lack of robustness and intuitiveness while using hand postures and instrumented devices. The main objective is to study how users move during mid-air sketching, develop qualitative insights regarding such movements, and consequently implement a computational approach to determine when the user intends to draw in mid-air without the use of an explicit mechanism (such as an instrumented controller or a specified hand-posture). By recording the user’s hand trajectory, the idea is to simply classify this point as either hover or stroke. The resulting model allows for the classification of points on the user’s spatial trajectory. Drawing inspiration from the way users sketch in mid-air, this research first specifies the necessity for an alternate approach for processing bare hand mid-air curves in a continuous fashion. Further, this research presents a novel drawing intent recognition work flow for every recorded drawing point, using three different approaches. We begin with recording mid-air drawing data and developing a classification model based on the extracted geometric properties of the recorded data. The main goal behind developing this model is to identify drawing intent from critical geometric and temporal features. In the second approach, we explore the variations in prediction quality of the model by improving the dimensionality of data used as mid-air curve input. Finally, in the third approach, we seek to understand the drawing intention from mid-air curves using sophisticated dimensionality reduction neural networks such as autoencoders. Finally, the broad level implications of this research are discussed, with potential development areas in the design and research of mid-air interactions

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities