Understanding Break-ability through Screen-based Affordances

Richard Grafton, Oussama Metatla & Anne Roudaut. 2025.

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25)

Can J.J. Gibson’s concept of affordances be empirically examined using screen-based technology? We show how screen-based affordances can be examined through the use case of perceptual toughness, i.e. the break-ability of a virtual object. We present two user experiments (n=72, n=66) examining break-ability through a novel ’Perceptual Impact Testing’ methodology and online screen-based 3D virtual environment. We show that judgements of break-ability are systematically distorted when a perceiver’s virtual ‘Point of Observation’ or virtual environment’s ‘Horizonal Geometry’ are manipulated. These statistically significant results provide evidence that: 1) direct perception can account for perceptual distortions of break-ability; 2) Gibsonian affordances can be empirically examined through screen-based interactions.