Future of Video Games to Evolve to Thinking, Not Hand Controls

That’s the future of gaming according to an article by Jason Wilson in his AR/VR Weekly. Wilson was writing a review of a recent  VentureBeat story about a  Game Developers Conference in which the discussion was all about how to make a cyber-link with a game players mind.  By turning your thoughts into the controller. Instead of the Wii approach in which players hands and body make the game work, someday it will only take using their brains.

It’s about how neurons fire off during brain activity. An encephalogram can read these firings and chart them. But those readings are still too noisy to use with a game platform, for now.

There are already products, such as Microsoft’s X-box Adaptive Controllers, that assist people with limited mobility in playing certain games.

It’s possible to read body cues and signals from some AI-driven controllers for certain games, developers say. But a true “mind-meld” with the game platform is the ultimate goal for marketers, which would make any company’s bottom line soar. Developers imagine putting sensors in headsets that read the neuron patterns and respond.

Mike Ambinder, a psychologist, and researcher at Valve, packed a room at the Game Developers Conference with a talk on whether you can control games directly with a brain-computer interface (BCI).

Ambinder says we would need to measure patterns of activity, whether they are temporal (happening over time) or spatial:

“We simply want to understand like, locations have increased levels of activity in the brain and hopefully what they are,” Ambinder said. “If we can take these patterns of activity, and describe them in terms of something a player is experiencing,” then we can understand whether a set of electrical impulses means the player is happy or sad or something else.

Ambinder’s approach involves marrying psychology and game-playing technology to create the ultimate game experience.

read the article by Dean Takahashi at venturebeat.com or the Wilson post at getrevue.co