Despite my semi-irrational fear of MMORPGs and mind-reading, I'm always happy to see signs that humankind will be able to control stuff with their brains.
Next on the roster for manipulation of this sort (here I always thought it would be cyborg limbs) it's video games! And you won't even need surgery.
In this newly designed device, a series of sensors placed on a special headset will record your intentions, emotions, and even (ugh) facial expressions in order to help you better interact with a virtual world.
Particularly nifty is how they got the device to figure out what you want -- it's surprisingly intuitive -- they just put people in the same situations over and over again and tried to figure out what their brain waves had in common.
So, getting a game to know which direction you want to walk in just by thinking about it is pretty awesome, but you may be surprised to know that that's not what this is even for. So what is the darn thing supposed to do? And why the hell does it want to know your emotions? The answer is crazier than you might think.
So it can cater to them.
Homing in on these revealing brain waves allows the EPOC system to quickly deduce a player's emotional qualities and react to it by, for example, changing the music of a game in real-time to match the user's tension or throw in more villains in case a player seemed to get bored of a certain world.
This three hundred dollar headset is going to read your mind just so it can throw more monsters at you when you're bored? Oh, come on! I want a full package. Supposedly the full body movement stuff is still in the planning phase.
I get the impression that primarily this headset does the realistic-expression-mimicking thing for online avatars, so it's primarily a tool for extra-realistic online social interaction. It has thirty different presets that it tries to select out from the signals you give it, so it's not an exact replication of the one-of-a-kind look on your face at a particular moment, but it's still probably going to be closer to your real expression than, say, your WeeMee on AIM.
Look out, Second Life. Things are about to get a whole lot creepier.
2 comments:
Creepy-awesome.
But yes, mostly creepy.
I predict it will mostly be a gimmick, though, until somebody does something really remarkable with the technology-which will likely take years.
Or just make fancy polygraphs.
Hey... sorry to leave this as a comment, but I don't think I have an e-mail address for you. I just wanted to know if you planned on continuing the blog in the Fall. Let me know at cmasondirector@gmail.com. Thanks! Enjoy your summer.
-Grace Kendall, Connect2Mason Director
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