Serina Deen, who has a background in neuroscience research, is a 4th year medical student at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Here she describes how your brain waves could get involved in your gaming.
I remember back in my freshman year of college, sitting in a pitch black room the size of a closet, staring straight ahead of me at a screen with a blinking green light on it, while an infrared sensor hanging from the motorcycle helmet strapped on my head beamed into my eyes. Fraternity hazing, perhaps? No, just another undergraduate trying to make a buck by participating in a paid psych experiment. They told me at the end of the grueling hour that they were monitoring my concentration by tracking my eye movements, which were supposed to be vigilantly following the blinking green light (I have to admit, my eyes wandered a bit as I kept trying to steal glances at the clock).
Well, things have improved significantly since then. Now, they’re coming up with games that are supposed to actually read your brain waves to gauge your concentration…
Darth Vader, created by engineers at NeuroSky, for example. Imagine you’re dressed like Darth Vader- black mask, cape, light saber. Maybe a couple of us (ahem) might have already done so in our geekier past. Except this time, inside the black mask lies a sensor that touches your forehead and reads your
brain’s electrical impulses, which in turn lights up the saber that you’re holding while you’re concentrating. If your mind wanders, the wand goes dark. Imagine this type of technology being used to improve your golf game, or to pick certain songs on your ipod based on your mood. Children who play the race car game Gran Turismo with this technology, for example, can only reach maximum speed while they’re concentrating.
The technology is based on electroencephalography, or EEG. It’s been used for decades in medicine, for example to detect if someone is having a seizure. But it’s just recently been applied to the gaming industry. While the applications are just beginning to be hashed out, and some doubt their marketability, I’m holding out for a day when I can turn on my microwave using only my thoughts.
2 Comments
That is really cool. If they can apply that to gaming like you said, I will definitely don the Darth Vader helmet once more.
Imagining the future, a quite-fun hobby that i have developed… I have flashing before my eyes, Yahoo news headliner: Screening children for concentration index (or for health applications: a proposed ‘ADD index’) for admittance into “High-level” institutions. Yes while refining the quality of education delivery and having the cream of the crop in your classroom, or in the words of a kindergardten teacher, “best day of my life”. we (meaning YOU) will be the determiner/Darth Vader of the future. AS individual researchers, do we know the weight of our work when it is collected and integrated into other disciplines?
Envisioning a sample of a such ultra-screened population and the strata organized as a result, would you say that maybe experimental modules can also be arranged in the same manner? Well if you would like to go back to medicine… the sort of Pavlovian response you talk about applied in modern technology, would be of great benefit to those children with recalcitrant behavioral disorders. My mind immediately raised a question, if one was resistant to this kind of punishment-method almost from the start, you could zap them and would it help? Substrate of the neuro-behavioral disorder could possibly be measured by this technique just as a mode of diagnosis? Say hello to the future.
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