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).