“If you are a developer and in 2022 you don’t have one of these, you will be making a mistake,” says Gabe Newell.
Biomedical engineering has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past decades, and one of the most promising areas is that of brain-computer interfaces (BCI, for its acronym in English). They are devices capable of analyzing the brain waves of your user to interpret them as data. Something that sounds like science fiction, yes, but Gabe Newell is clear that this is the future of video games. This is stated by the president of Valve in a recent interview for New Zealand public television.
In this interview, Newell confirmed that his company is currently working on several unannounced video games, although as usual, they also have some hardware projects In hands. In this, Valve is investigating the use of BCI in video games, in conjunction with virtual reality headsets such as its own Valve Index, to interpret what the player feels in real time. “We are working on an open source project so that everyone can have reading technologies [cerebral] high-resolution solutions implemented on their helmets, in a handful of different modes, “he says.
Mike Ambinder, a Valve researcher, playing with a BCI on his head. Source: TVZNThe project in question is OpenBCI, whose managers presented in November the design of a device known as’Galea‘, in development for use in conjunction with the most popular virtual reality devices. “If you are a software developer and in 2022 you don’t have one of these devices in your test lab, you’ll be making a silly mistake“says Newell, showing his full confidence in the future of this technology. Its importance lies in the possibility of interpret what the player feels in real time during the game, and react to it.
The games may increase the difficulty if the player gets bored, for exampleAccording to the president of Valve, developers will be able to use brain readings to increase immersion of the player, to personalize the gaming experience, such as increasing the difficulty slightly if it is detected that the player is bored, as an example. This in the short term, of course. But, looking into the more distant future, Newell believes that brain-computer interfaces will allow transmit information to minds, and create better, more realistic experiences than a player can perceive through “your organic peripherals“, referring to the eyes and ears.
“You are used to experiencing the world through your eyes“says Gabe Newell,” but the eyes were created with a low cost approach that does not care about error rates or failures […] The visual experience, the visual fidelity that we will be able to create … The real world will cease to be the metric on which we compare best possible visual fidelity“To this, he adds that” the real world will appear flat, dull, blurry, compared to the experiences that can be created in people’s brains. “
The real world will seem dull compared to experiences in brainsGabe NewellIt is one thing to transmit images directly to minds, but Newell also speaks of the possibility of edit emotions in the brains of the player. He talks about possible therapeutic purposes for such technology, to help treat mental illness or sleep problems. Or even to eliminate problems like vertigo in virtual reality games, by counteracting that sensation directly in the brain. In fact, Newell assures that the latter is already possible thanks to the BCIs, and to implement it right now “it’s more a question of certification than a scientific topic. “
While many of these applications are promising, Valve does not want give them a commercial use yet. Simply because the speed at which technology advances is so high that they do not want to create a device now and that it becomes obsolete shortly after being released. “The rate at which we learn things is so high that you don’t want to say very soon ‘okay, let’s close it all and create a product, and go through the approval processes’, when six months later we would have something that would have allowed a lot of additional functions. “
Is about a very promising technology, especially in the medical field, but with possible interesting applications within the world of video games. And with Valve immersed in this field, we’ll see what emerges from their research over the next decade. In view of the success of Half-Life: Alyx, surely more than one player is looking forward to learning about the next technical revolution of this company. If you haven’t had the chance to play it, in our Half-Life: Alyx review we tell you why this adventure is so special.
More about: Valve, Gabe Newell, Virtual Reality and Valve Index.
