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Biofeedback Gaming
runningwater writes "A new kind of game was debuted at the E3 expo. It is called Journey to Wild Divine. The game features a biofeedback USB interface designed to allow a player (or players) to navigate through the game using their mind power, breath, and heart rate. This is a wild and visionary concept which works so fluidly you can blow on the screen and objects move as if propelled by your breath. The game features an awesome soundtrack, including Grammy-nominated artists and spanning many genres. This is the new generation of gaming, and you have never seen anything like this before." Their site has a page with more information about the biofeedback aspect.
1. Will the game be fun to play?
2. Will playing a biofeedback game teach you how to do things with your state of mind that are difficult to learn in other ways?
It's an intresting idea... the devil (or God) will be in the details, though.
The testimonials are what you would expect from a new product but with no mention of an estimated release date or where to purchase it makes me wonder if this could just end up being a marketing tool without an actual release.
I guess I'm going to have to wait until I see something more tangible.
Snowy Angelique Maslov - http://www.snowy.org/
Personally, I'm excited about this simply for the opportunity to have an emperical means for assisting people in meditation, in their own homes. This could open up whole groups of individuals for meditation and the related philosophy or theology with which they want to associate it.
That said, I'd be particularly excited if the system could somehow be made extensible, i.e. that using a front-end software they provide you associate certain activities with normal system commands. In such a system, for example, you could perhaps script an interface to react to your GSR to control any game.
Alternately, I'd hope that they have a simple front end so that an end-user could write a program to read the same information from the sensors. This would allow us to basically create parallel games or simply meditative tools without the "storyline" or particular format of their game.
"Stumble before you crawl"
This is a wild and visionary concept which works so fluidly you can blow on the screen and objects move as if propelled by your breath.
umm I had a biofeedback input device on my TANDY Color Computer in 1985. and it had a couple of games that allowed you to "play" them.
Whil I'm sure they have advanced cince then it is hardly visionary.
I love it when the new pup's learn old tricks they think they were the first to come up with it.
Yes it's better cince they take more than 2 inputs (heartrate and skin conductivity for "biorythim") but then I played with a ekg input device in college in 1990 also..
when they can make it so I can play quake with my thoughts THEN I'll be impressed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I used software set up with an EEG (which measures brainwave activity), and the goal was to make the fishes on the screen more tranquil by relaxing myself. This game seems like it may train people to be more anxious constantly. (I'm not dissing the idea, which is really cool.)
I've been working in some psychology research labs for some time now. One the professors I've worked with studies neurofeedback, i.e. monitoring the electrical activity of the brain with electrodes attached on the head. I've actually helped training a bunch of kids to move a cursor on a screen simply by getting them to be concentrated on moving it wherever it had to be at that moment. ( some info here and here. It's not excluded at all that in the near future, we'll be able to gain control of computer interfaces with a little help from such devices. It's my first post on /. , nice ;)
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
Did they forget the military? (Keep pushing a soldiers buttons with an offshoot of this until you can't push'em anymore)
How about hackers that want to really screw with your mind?
How about cult leaders that require this type of game to "enlighten" someone?
How about game makers that really want to start toying with the user's emotions?
This game teaches you how to alter your mind and focus?
I listened to the MP3 from their web site and it seems that song's theme was much like the way people in Boulder Colorado(Where the game is being developed) think. The song has repeated many-a-time:
Why do we kill people who kill people To show people that killing people is wrong?
Anti Capital punishment.
What might the themes of the future versions of these games teach our children? Our soldiers? Our next generation?
It makes me think of the episode on Star Trek the next Generation where the people of the ship were controlled by a mind altering game that was designed to break into the human mind and control it.
Sort of...with the Mindlink controller. They were supposed to come out with biofeedback software for this device but the project was canceled. Ah, those were the days...
It's worse than that:
... "are to serve as an integrative force among groups aligned with our vision and mission."
"At the Wild Divine Project, our founding principles"
Are they anticipating an increase in followers after releasing their "biofeedback" game? Perhaps the flower wearing, left leaning, tree hugging people at the company are actually taking this "Rocky Mountain High" thing a little bit too far.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
The Matrix Reloaded game has a "Focus" bar which allows your character to do matrix like moves, slow down time and such. It would be cool if you really had to calm yourself down and focus with the bio feedback device.
Tell that to the DDR crowd...
Isn't Dance Dance Revolution one of the highest selling arcade games?
I know it spawned a bunch of PC Rip offs
moo.
Used to be, there was this cool place in Seattle called Entros. For a while there was one in San Francisco, too. Now they are gone, with no trace save a "demo" web site.
It was a restaurant/bar that had about five entertainment areas around it. The entertainment areas were always cool and different.
The most famous was "Interface", where one person wears a blindfold and a camera, and the other person sits in front of a screen watching what the camera sees; using two-way radio, the second guy tells the first guy where to go and what to do. "Go left, step forward, reach down, no, left, no, LEFT, feel for the ball, YOU TOUCHED IT! GO BACK!" Within a set period of time you had to accomplish certain tasks. If you got them all done, you were allowed to enter the victory lounge. I never got to see that lounge...
Anyway, they had a sort of game show where you had to compete to see who was the calmest. They would hook up the players to biofeedback, and then they would do various things to try to shake the players' calm. For the winner, it played a recorded voice saying something like "YOU ARE THE BUDDHA".
I miss Entros.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
As far as I can see, we've got pre-rendered doors every ten metres that you open by reaching a different heart-rate, skin-response, and so on. Oh boy! Sometimes the door opening is disguised as making the boat move, sometiems as making the crystal ball light up, but really...
When console controllers were equipped with analog triggers for the first time, did someone say "now we can have a revolutionary game where some of the tasks require the player to hold the right trigger just the right amount while holding the left trigger a different amount?" No. They said, now we can let the player fire faster or slower, hit the brake harder or softer, or any number of other natural analog processes we haven't been able to control up until now. A game where the only challenge is to guess how hard to hold the triggers would be stunningly boring. A metaphor is needed, some sort of consistent meaning for the pressure. Otherwise the whole thing is just a novelty.
Call me when I have to adjust my heart-rate to keep my dragon under control in the next Panzer Dragoon. There's a challenge that would teach you how to stay calm under intense pressure.
After reading Snow Crash I wanted to build a portable VR computer. For a while I worked with the Virtual Boy which was hacked to be programmable using Java on an attached PC. Then we got some small screens like used in older versions of the iGlasses which was connected to a control chip that took dual NTSC signals. They were pretty cool but the resolution wasn't good enough for anything like text and you could see the edges of them if you tried. My current design is a small cd man sized portable computer that talks to the Net via WiFi and uses iGlasses and the Twiddler keyboard/mouse combo. I'd love to use some sort of motion sensitive gloves and brain power instead but that is probably a pie in the sky version. It'd be really cool to see some sort of neurofeedback input device added to something like the iGlasses. Once these things become standardized input devices we can really start working on the software hacking portion of things. It could be a real gift to be able to mouse around the desktop using brain power and if people are able to learn enough mind macros (what I called them.. probably a better technical term) then we could have some really powerful desktops finally. You could think a macro for a given program and the program would just appear. :)
:)
The whole concept excites me. My sister is handicapped and has a lot of trouble using computers so a lot of my work is towards inventing easier ways to do so. My mouse to brain hack was an early attempt.
In a related topic we also used hypnotism on players which we found could sometimes make the game very lifelike (by suggesting the player believe that it's real) and it helped a bit with the attempts at brain control. The two concepts seemed to work well together. Maybe it helps the player concentrate on their learned mental commands to be hypnotised? I dunno.. was just my guess.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Yes; there's some hazy new-ageishness about their work. On the other hand, there is also some decent science there. Biofeedback, in this context, is used to measure alterations in your physical state, and that change controls what happens in the game. In essence, in order to control the game world you need to learn to control your own physical state: heartrate, sweat production, brainwave activity.
When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). At one point, my parents signed me up for some biofeedback sessions. I would go to this office in downtown Denver, and they would put one of those electrode nets on my head -- they always used to squirt some cold goop into each electrode to ensure good conductivity between the electrode and my scalp. This was annoying, because the goop got kind of crusty when it dried out -- always had to wash my hair when I got home.
Anyway, once the net was in place they'd hook me up to a computer. The screen displayed information about the state of my brainwaves -- alphas, betas, gammas, deltas -- and my task was to attempt to control the relative levels thereof. The theory was that if I could learn to do that, I could apply the same technique elsewhere (eg in school) to sharpen my concentration.
I never noticed that it worked especially well. I suspect there are two reasons for this: 1) I didn't stick with it for very long; and 2) the information about my brainwaves was displayed as colored graphs -- line graphs, bar graphs, and I seem to recall a pie chart, too. Staring at a line graph scrolling past on a computer screen for an hour is really damn boring. The objective was to heighten my concentration skills. Presenting me with a boring-ass chart was probably not the best way to do that.
If I did well in a session, they would let me use their computer to play Commander Keen for a while before my parents came to pick me up. I was much more interested in playing Commander Keen than in those stupid charts.
For that reason, I think this game may be a huge advance over the stuff they had me do. Having an external objective to focus on (ie manipulating the game environment) is much more interesting than trying to make colored lines stay low. If the price isn't too high, I may just buy a copy of the game and the USB controller and give it a shot.