Inverse affordances

While thinking of hand manipulation affordances, an idea came to mind. I'll call it inverse affordances for now. The idea is something like this: the user wants to perform such and such an action on an object, so what tool or procedure would be useful for doing such an action? An example case would be unscrewing a bolt, so what size wrench (8mm? 12mm?) would be best for that task? Or a screwdriver... what size screwdriver do I need? I can see this being especially useful for telemanipulation, even something like space maintenance/construction. Hey, I'd even like to pull out a cameraphone, point it at whatever bolt I'm trying to unscrew, and have it tell me what size wrench I need. From that standpoint it could be a "mechanic's assistant."

Now, I'm not going to try to solve this problem from start to finish right now, it might be interesting to setup a sort of Woz study, where all of the objects are annotated manually ahead of time, and then the user interacts with the system.