Myron Krueger — Videoplace and responsive environments

1975

Artists: Myron Krueger · Year: 1975 · Medium: Responsive environment installations — video-input interactive spaces · Substrate: Camera input processed by custom hardware and software; output projected back onto screens or walls; real-time computer vision and response · Place: Madison, Wisconsin / Storrs, Connecticut, USA · Institution: University of Wisconsin–Madison (early work); University of Connecticut (Videoplace residency) Myron Krueger began working on what he called responsive environments at the University of Wisconsin in 1969. His earliest pieces — Metaplay (1970), Psychic Space (1971), Glowflow (1969) — placed viewers in rooms where cameras tracked their positions and movements, and projected images that responded to what the viewers did. Viewers saw themselves abstracted, their outlines colored, their motions amplified, their interactions with other viewers or with virtual objects choreographed by the room's programmed response. Videoplace, which Krueger developed through the late 1970s and 1980s at the University of Connecticut, is the mature form of the responsive-environment concept. Multiple participants in separate physical spaces could be combined in a shared virtual environment, their silhouettes interacting with one another and with programmed objects. The system was the direct ancestor of contemporary augmented reality and motion-tracked interactive installation; every gesture-controlled art piece, every depth-camera installation, every multiplayer virtual environment inherits from Krueger's work. What Krueger argued, decades before the term virtual reality had settled on head-mounted displays, was that the interesting interface was not the screen or the headset but the room. The body moves naturally in three-dimensional space; the computer can track the body and respond to it; the result is a virtual experience that does not require you to strap equipment to your head. This was the lost path of VR — the one Char Davies picked up for Osmose twenty years later, and the one that most immersive-installation practice now follows. Krueger is still alive. Lore Krueger's 1983 book Artificial Reality was an early use of that phrase in print, and the book argued for the responsive-environment approach against the heads-up-display approach that eventually dominated commercial VR. Krueger was largely excluded from the commercial VR boom of the late 1980s and 1990s, and his work has received less institutional recognition than its influence merits. Videoplace was exhibited at the SIGGRAPH conferences and at various museums, and the system is preserved in part at the University of Connecticut's archive. Sources • Krueger, Myron — Artificial Reality (Addison-Wesley, 1983) • Krueger, Myron — Artificial Reality II (Addison-Wesley, 1991) • University of Connecticut — Krueger archive