Introduction to Mediated Reality

Personal Cybernetics and Humanistic Intelligence are new and rapidly growing fields of research in the area of human-computer interaction. These areas of research involve personal wearable imaging devices with intelligence that arises from the existence of a human user in the feedback loop of a computational process, in which the human user and the computational process are inextricably intertwined. Unlike the typical goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is to emulate human intelligence with computers, Humanistic Intelligence (HI) creates a close synergy in which Intelligent Signal Processing is used to harness the processing power of the human brain. HI gives rise to a symbiosis between human and computer in which each uses the other within a closely coupled signal processing feedback loop. The computer performs basic low-level signal processing functions, using data obtained from a first person perspective (wearable camera, microphones, miniature wearable radar, biosensors, etc.), while the human performs high-level cognitive tasks, providing a computationally “mediated reality.” Personal Cybernetics and HI form a basis for augmenting, deliberately diminishing, or otherwise mediating the visual perception of reality. Although the visual modality is most often used in mediated reality systems based on current technology, other modalities such as touch, taste, and olfaction may be mediated as well. In the visual domain, a system that can augment, diminish, or otherwise alter the visual perception of reality is called a “Reality Mediator” (RM). By way of explanation, “virtual reality” creates a completely computer-generated environment, “augmented reality” uses an existing, real-life environment, and adds computer-generated information (virtual objects) thereto, “diminished reality” filters the environment (i.e., it alters real objects, replaces them with virtual ones, or renders them imperceptible), and mediated reality combines augmented and diminINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN–COMPUTER INTERACTION, 15(2), 205–208 Copyright © 2003, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.