PT 2014 - Special Session on Playware Technology

Playware is defined as intelligent hardware and software that creates play and playful experiences for users of all ages. Playware research combines engineering knowledge on robotics, human-robot interaction and modern artificial intelligence with humanistic knowledge on play and play culture. Through synthesis, research aims at building insight into play and playware by designing, creating and implementing playware which plays an important role of interactive communication between human and robotic systems in the society. The special session at IEEE RO-MAN 2014 will bring together researchers from these interdisciplinary fields to share, discuss and advance this field.
Typically, playware research has a core technology research activity focusing on research into playware technology and its supporting fundamental research areas of modern AI robotics, adaptivity, modular robotics, and tangible interfaces. Engineering researchers perform fundamental research in these areas to develop the basis for understanding and creating user-interactive robotic systems. To operationalise this knowledge and develop prototypes with users, the research takes its point of departure from the technological discipline and the humanistic discipline investigating, understanding and exploiting these scientific fields (modern artificial intelligence, modular robotics, and tangible interaction) in combination with an understanding of play and play dynamics, and in more general terms play culture and human motivation. The knowledge is combined in synthesis to develop design principles, prototypes, and demonstrators of playware technology, and a choice of these demonstrators are refined to become playware technology products. The resulting playware technology is systematically studied and investigated in the messy real-world environments in order to guide the next cycle of synthesis, demonstrator and prototype development. Hence, the research is based upon the interdisciplinary research on how playware in the form of intelligent hardware and software creates play and playful experiences amongst the users in their environment