Category: Spring 2020

Response, or interactive medium in an art form, is a medium itself that comes with its own principles and laws. As is mentioned in Responsive Environment, “the distinguishing aspect of the medium is, of course, it responds to the viewer in an interesting way” (Krueger 430). Response as a medium is all about the outputs of an environment triggered by the real-time human-machine interaction. The inputs from participants, or the triggers could be the operations a player performs on the program, or just the physical attributes performed by the player, like voice pitch, posture and so on. The response to the physical interactions of participants relies heavily on the sensitivity of the sensors, as is implied by Krueger, “the only aesthetic concern is the quality of the interaction”.

How would a response in VR seem intelligent (give an example, if possible)?

Responsive environment can perceive human behavior and response with auditory or visual feedback, which can be intelligently presented in virtual reality situation. Virtual reality is more immersive and focused on personal experience than other media like movies or books. So the participant can have more freedom to behave compared with sitting on a fixed position, surrounded by many other people and facing a fixed screen. With the ability of capturing the motion of human’s entire body, data VR can read will be much more complex and diverse so that after being processed by control systems it can generate more complicate responses and allow the intelligent learning process. VR may bot necessarily designed complicate in terms of the presence but the underlying formulas in making the response are on a much higher level than others, in a sense that they can specially fit a participant after him using it for a certain amount of time. For example, different form mobile phone games, a VR game of some activity simulation can possibly adjust its environment or game settings by reading the player’s input during the game time. The speed of movement, the scope of action, the reaction time or his height can matter and the game can be adapted to its player to build a most suitable playing environment for him. After the new environment is provided, new data of the interaction input can be sensed and by processing it again, the game model can be continuously modified.

The projects that Myron Krueger describes in his article “Responsive Environments” are primarily all based on the phenomenon that a captivating responsive interaction can be enough on its own. The interaction itself does not need to be very sophisticated as long as the user feels that what he or she is doing is generating some form of an output that is responsive to his or her actions. One of the examples the author gives is his project “Metaplay”. In this project users would use their finger to draw lines which were actually generated by a computer. As it was very difficult to trace the shape of a person’s hand and finger, the actual line output was often not as accurate. However, because of this exciting type of interaction, users were so captivated that they wouldn’t notice the inaccuracy: “Happily, neither the artist nor the audience were concerned about the quality of the drawings. What was exciting was interacting in this novel way through a man-computer-video link spanning a mile” (Krueger 425). In my opinion, this example accurately describes how a response can act as a medium. It happens when the response itself is so novel and fascinating that it completely immerses the user into the interaction. The user then experiences something fully through interacting with the response of the system and having a two-way dialogue with it.

How does response act as a medium?

Response becomes a medium once the focus shifts from the visuals and aural response to the interaction itself. Quoting Krueger, “the only aesthetic concern is the quality of the interaction.”. Hence, using sensors of high quality, capable of perceiving as much relevant and accurate user input, is an essential component to maximize the quality of interaction. GLOWFLOW took the opposite approach where they made compromises in the interaction, through adding delay, to bring more focus to the visual mood of the environment. Although they did achieve their intended effect, this compromise seemed to be the main reason for GLOWFLOW succeeding more as a kinetic sculpture than as a responsive environment.

The wide application of responsive technologies, particularly the way it can redefine our approach to education, is exciting. Such customizable and responsive environments would teach the child how to think, not the things they should memorize. Also, interaction is a more accurate way of acquiring knowledge in the real world. Due to its high customizability, the responsive medium allows for creating environments that could provoke intended interactions from users.

How does response act as a medium? 

The paper “Responsive Environments” by Myron W. Krueger provides great insights into the concept of responsive environments which “perceives human behavior and responds with intelligent auditory and visual feedback.” (423)  By mentioning different projects he worked on, such as GLOWFLOW, MAZE, and VIDEOPLACE, he suggests a new art medium based on real-time response and interaction between humans and machines. He asserts that “Response is a medium.” (430)  It is important for such a medium to understand the action of the participant and respond intelligently. For example, considering the participant’s position, the environment can create an interactive experience involving different sensations by imposing effects on “lights, sound mechanical movement, or through any means that can be perceived.” (430) Some are even more advanced by learning from experiences with different individuals and responding in the most effective way from the judgments. The upshot of this is that demonstrating intelligent responses towards users/participants, or in other words responses towards human actions, acts as a medium.

From my perspective, the paper is a good read as it gives me such an eye-opening understanding of the responsive environment and its applications in different fields, including education, psychology, and psychotherapy. For example, although such environments still have a few constraints in the perceptual system which limit their responses in a certain way, they can serve as a great alternative to traditional teaching or enrich the students’ experiences through meaningful interactions.

In the fields of accessibility and childcare, responsive environments refer to settings that allow the child or disabled person to gain a sense of influence over their surroundings. The idea behind these settings is that they are meant to motivate the person to learn and — more importantly — interact with the environment. Bringing this definition over to general user experience design, a responsive environment also serves a similar purpose of motivating the end-user to interact with the environment by giving that user a sense of influence. Through intuitive cues placed by the environment, the user would ideally be able to navigate the environment and slowly learn its rules and quirks over the course of this navigation.

Given that machine learning and AI has progressed so much within the past few years, the logical next step would be to implement some form of learning into responsive environments. As a small-scale example, a responsive drawing program might learn which tools the user picks the most and rearrange the toolbar accordingly or suggest tools to use at certain times. From my perspective, giving responsive environments the ability to learn makes those environments more responsive in turn. After all, if a responsive environment is meant to motivate a user to interact with that environment through intuitive cues, then a learning responsive environment would (hopefully) enhance the intuitive nature of those cues. This would then further motivate user interactions; the idea of a learning responsive environment would open many opportunities for designers to enhance their created environments for users.

VR technology is already changing our world. As an example six-seven years ago, virtual reality was just an entertainment, exclusively for computer games. However, today Virtual Reality has brought some significant changes to our lives. As an example the usage of Virtual Reality in construction, it allows people to design homes and rooms, almost directly making changes to the project. A building project is broadcast in a VR headset and a person immediately sees how it will look with all the construction nuances. The possibilities of “immersion” in VR are much more modest than in a fully interactive virtual environment, but with sufficiently large screens and high-quality special effects, the impression of such demonstrations remains indelible. Nowadays, a lot of people think that entertainment and games are the main task of virtual reality. However, this is not the case, for instance large companies – such as Facebook and Microsoft – integrate virtual reality in many areas, starting from art to medicine. 

Krueger in his readings points out that the idea of having a responsive environment and that being the message, I believe experimented virtual realities could gradually become actual-life applications. And I feel like education would be the strongest area. Thinking back to my learning experience versus say my father’s, technology is much more widely accepted and it’s almost becoming expected. The concept of using a responsive environment in a learning surroundings could be advantageous in that it is more interactive, instead of one teacher explaining topic to the whole class, virtual learning would enable students to participate and be engaged physically and mentally. 

It’s hard to list all the advantages of new visual technologies, but I certainly believe that virtual reality is a new world that is starting now.

Kwastek quotes Jochen Schulte-Sasse to describe “medium . . . as a ‘bearer of information . . . that fundamentally shapes it. . . so as to give form to human access to reality’” (167). Krueger asserts response as a “medium comprised of sensing, display and control systems” (430). To understand response as a medium, then, is to understand it as that which simultaneously shapes and presents the information contained within systems. As elaborated by both authors, these systems contain technical and aesthetic components which, as Kwastrek repeats, form some sort of gestalt via interaction with a user. Kwastek ultimately veers away from calling interactive media arts a medium, favoring the analogy of apparatus. Response, then, might serve as the medium of interactive media, as that which is manipulated by the artist via a system which requires interaction from a user.

How does response act as a medium?

Myron Krueger’s text is key in illustrating how response can act as a medium, particularly by focusing on what he calls responsive environments, which “perceive human behavior and respond with intelligent auditory and visual feedback” (423). By detailing the motivations, technicalities, and deliberate decisions behind installations/responsive environments such as METAPLAY, PSYCHIC SPACE, and other of his famous pieces, Krueger points out how response is the medium. In an environment where the interaction between humans and the environment is the most important component, visual and auditory aesthetics are of secondary importance. Instead, crafting an experience that successfully responds to users actions (or lack of it) and making the response evident to them is key, and is the main factor that establishes response as a medium.

Reading this in 2020, and being fully aware that Krueger’s text was published in the 70s makes me wonder how much this notion has changed, particularly when areas like interactive media arts, integrated digital media, and creative technology are more consolidated than before. Now, there is no question that response is the medium, but the aesthetics and quality of that same response (the visuals, audio, animations, etc.) have now arguably become almost as important as the interaction itself. Now that we have surpassed the age where people get instantly awed and amazed at the existence of technology like VR, projection mapping, etc. it feels like new, relevant yet modern forms of output need to continuously be developed.