Valve's resident experimental psychologist, Mike Ambinder, said at a conference in San Francisco that the bio-sensitive tests "worked pretty well."
Game makers have struggled to escape the confines of the console for decades, and countless failed products like Nintendo's "Virtual Boy" system show an industry that's still trapped. In the last five years, motion gaming from the likes of Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox Kinect has excited audiences, but it's not hard core: the best titles tend to be party games and fitness apps. Motion control may have brought players closer to their consoles, but a future generation of consoles, wearable and bioaware, will get closer to the players — and maybe even inside of them.
Would
you want to play "Left 4 Dead" if the zombies could literally sense
your fear? Valve is hoping that this kind of biofeedback will make its
popular shooter even more fun.
"On smartphones, you usually have these little games," Pedro Lopes a Ph.D. student who worked on this project at Germany’s Hasso Plattner Institute, told NBC News. "But I wanted to see: Can we bring this extra degree of immersion? What people canonically have done is use motors. But those are big and heavy. Instead, we use your muscle as a motor."
For the study, Lopes and the rest of the team set participants up with a flying game to play on a smartphone. First, they used a motor-based system, then they used electrodes attached to their forearms. Overwhelmingly, the subjects opted for the "shock."
"They would say things like: 'I feel like this force is really coming from the game!'" Lopes said.
Dekko
plans to release a table-top board game later this year that will be
projected onto physical surfaces with its augmented reality software.
And while virtual reality is particularly alluring for all the "Matrix" imagery it conjures, it's not the only way to mess with reality.
Just take Dekko — a startup that recently raised $3.2 million in venture capital funding. It's releasing what founder and chief executive Matt Miesnieks likes to call a "real-world operating system."
"Everybody has some sort of imagination," Miesnieks told NBC News. "We would love to bring that to life. For instance, if you're a child, you might think, 'Wouldn't it be great if my Mickey Mouse doll could get up and start talking to me?'"
For its first in-house app, to be released later this year, Miesnieks said that Dekko is developing a tabletop boardgame that can be played entirely with computer-generated images.
In the video games of the future, the human body may be the most powerful console of all.
We're not in "The Matrix" ... yetWhile total immersion is something game companies continually promise, is it something we even want? Football fans may relish the opportunity to stand in RGIII's shoes when playing "Madden NFL," but they probably don't want to feel his pain when a 350-pound lineman barrels into him.
Speaking at Kill Screen's recent gaming conference twofivesix, Palmer Luckey, the creator of the Oculus Rift headset, said that a big part of his job right now is "managing expectations" between the enthusiasts who expect "The Matrix" and the critics that see another Virtual Boy-style flop in the making.
Similarly, Lopes said that "we're obviously very far" from seeing anything like his electrodes pop up on Amazon, or even Kickstarter.
"The research we do is very vision-driven; these are not things that you'll have in your home next year," he said. "Maybe they will impact technology in 10 years."
Invented
by twenty year old tinkerer and gearhead Palmer Luckey, the Oculus Rift
is being heralded as the first device that will succeed in making
virtual reality a tangible possibility for game developers.
Google Glass — the head-worn, video-capturing computer system — is certainly a beacon of hope for this kind of gaming gear, just as "life bands" like the Jawbone UP are for any developer hoping to make biofeedback sound like something other than pure geekiness.
But Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, noted that there's something that may make these new kinds of gaming systems a reality sooner than expected: advertising.
A researcher may not care about collecting reams of data on a person's physiological or emotional state. But how enticing does that prospect sound to a company like Sony or Microsoft that is trying to ramp up e-commerce for its always-connected retail system?via : MSNBC
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