Responsive media: media experiences in the age of thinking machines

This discussion of responsive media provides a perspective on the future of media experiences that are increasingly responsive to users' preference, alertness and their physical, digital, and social environment. By examining a range of future scenarios combining virtual-, remote-, and augmented-reality, autonomous vehicles, digital assistants and robots, we see that the responsiveness of media is what provides the key value. To reach the ultimate goal of augmented innovation in which thinking machines supplement humans, there are a number of technological and user-experience challenges that the research community needs to resolve. These challenges fall into a few key categories: throughput, latency, perception, intelligence, and interaction. While some challenges may be tackled purely technologically, others require insights from sociology and psychology to break new ground. The paper concludes that intelligent, responsive media will not fully supplant human intelligence, but will increasingly serve as augmentation to human creativity.