Blog #2: Myron Krueger and Mixed Reality

Whereas virtual reality attempts to simulate a world visually, mixed reality attempts to create an environment that the user can physically interact with. Mixed reality is less concerned with simulating a visually realistic world, as it is creating sometting that the user can intuitively and physically experience. This can be seen in virtual environments (Krueger's Videoplace) or, because of the increasingly widespread use of computer and microprocessing technology, even in our own "reality." "The massive increases in processing speeds ushering in today's microcomputing revolution thus serve less to revitalize the dream of perfect simulation than to underwrite a more expansive and fluid functional interpenetration of physical and virtual spaces" (Hansen, 3). "No longer a wholly distinct, if largely amorphous realm with rules all its own, the virtual now denotes a 'space full of information' that can be 'activated, revealed, reorganized and recombined, added to and transformed as the user navigates ... real space'" (Hansen, 2).

Myron Krueger is an artist who helped define the mixed reality paradigm. "For Krueger, 'natural information' means information produced through an extension of our natural--that is, embodied, perceptuomotor--interface with the world.... '...the human interface is evolving toward more natural information. Three-dimensional space is more, not less, intuitive than two-dimensional space.... Three-dimensional space is what we evolved to understand. It is more primitive, not more advanced' " (Hansen, 3). Krueger searched for an environment that viewers/users could intuitively interact with.

Videoplace (1970s) was an artificial reality created as a submersive environment with which the user could interact. Instead of using headsets, gloves and other virtual reality technology, Krueger created this piece with projectors and video cameras. Users would enter the room, and the cameras would capture their motions. An outline of the users image would be presented on the wall, and with continued movement, computer programs would distort the image in various ways. “Several different programs facilitate viewer interaction with the schematic traces of her bodily movement; for example they allow her to fill in the space within the lines with colored images of body parts or to interact with temporally divergent and continually reverberating captures of her movement” (Hansen, 35).

Videoplace is a mixed reality, in that, it creates a world that is not the real one, but it can be accessed through the physical world. The users interact and affect the computer by navigating real space with bodily motions that are intuitive and natural. “Videoplace seeks to engineer a human-computer cooperation so seamless that functional synchronicity becomes possible in practice” (Hansen, 37). Through an intuitive, three-dimensional nonencumbered interface, “complete convergence with natural perception” becomes possible (Hansen, 4).

Comments

To make my comments easily found, I will list them here and attach them as comments to this blog.

Comment 1 posted in response to Camille's first blog post.
Comment 2 posted in response to Antonella's comment on my Jane blog.
Comment 3 posted in response to Whitney's photograph blog.
Comment 4 posted in response to Antonella's mixed reality blog.

Blog #1: AI and AL in the Enderverse

To understand the character Jane (from the Ender’s Game Series by Orson Scott Card), you first need a basic understanding of the universe in which she exists. In the Enderverse (as it is called by fans) human beings have made many great technological developments because of contact with a more advanced alien race, which they nearly eradicated. By studying the alien ships they were able to create ships that travel the speed of light, and set up a computer (ansible) network that allows for instantaneous communication between the Hundred Worlds. (The Hundred Worlds is the name of the worlds united under Starways Congress.)

At the time of the book Speaker for the Dead, and its sequel Xenocide, the ansible network has been connected for over 3000 years. Jane lives in the ansible network, between in the space between the computers. She was born out of an intelligent computer game that existed before the humans started colonizing other worlds and building their network. The computer game was designed to challenge children in a battle school, and one child kept breaking the rules of the game—which caused the game to adapt. Out of this adaption, Jane emerged, and took up residence in the newly formed ansible network.

Once Jane came into consciousness, she gave herself an identity, decided on a gender, and designed a human face that she could use when talking to humans through terminals. As for her “body,” it “consisted of trillions of

… electronic noises, sensors, memory files, terminals. Most of them, like most functions of the human body, simply took care of themselves. Computers ran their assigned programs; humans conversed with their terminals; sensors detected or failed to detect whatever they were looking for; memory was filled, accessed, reordered, dumped. (Card 173)

Jane is a sentient being that evolved on her own, out of computer programs, and exists in a network of computers. She would be considered AL because of this, yet she doesn’t have a body in the way one would think of one. The AL described by Moravec and Hayles all evolve through some sort of physical interaction with outside stimuli and environment, even in simulations.

In the beginning, the computer game did adapt, but it was through interaction with one child. It didn’t have to learn how to survive in an environment, or evolve from the bottom up—it started out as a program designed to outwit a child, when it could no longer do that, it adapted and out of that adaption evolved an intelligent, sentient being.

Because Jane exists in a network of thousands, if not millions, of computers, her thought process are so much faster than a humans. She has “370,000 distinct levels of attention. Anything not in the top 50,000 levels was left alone except for the most routine sampling the most cursory examination” (Card 173) Along with this, Jane has “her own internal reality; her responses to outside stimuli, analogous to emotions, desires, reason, memory, dreaming” (Card 174).

She has all the thinking capabilities of humans, yet the ability to do it so much faster. This reminds me of Moravec’s last couple paragraphs in “The Universal Robot” in which he described our thought process once our brains are transferred to a computer.

Your new mind has a control labeled “speed.” It had been set at 1, to keep the simulations synchronized with the old brain, but now you can change it to 10,000, allowing you to communicate, react, and think ten thousand times faster. You now seem to have hours to respond to situations that previously seemed instantaneous. (Moravec 6)

*Quotes taken from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card.