In a recent interview with 1 News Valve CEO Gabe Newell, he discussed a partnership with OpenBCI to improve VR headsets, increase immersion and solve motion sickness in VR.
The vast majority of the interview focuses on future predictions for brain-computer interface technology (BCIs), which is hardware capable of interacting directly with brain signals to detect emotional responses, feelings and more.
“We are working on an open source project so that everyone can have high resolution [brain signal] read technologies embedded in headsets, in a lot of different modes, ”said Newell. “If you are a software developer in 2022 who doesn’t have one of these in your test lab, you are making a silly mistake … software developers for interactive experience[s] – you will absolutely use one of these modified RV head strips to do this routinely – simply because there is so much useful data. “
There are two specific benefits that VR would have discussed by Newell. For starters, it can significantly improve immersion, such as dynamically increasing difficulty if a player is getting bored or feeling unchallenged. Or maybe in a procedural game, if BCI realizes when a random layout is something you don’t particularly like or like.
Newell then explains that, in the future, BCIs will allow the creation of virtual worlds that go far beyond our perceptions of reality, stating that, “the real world will no longer be the metric we apply for the best possible visual fidelity”.
Towards the end, there is also a discussion of how BCIs in VR can essentially resolve motion sickness in VR, or that feeling of vertigo that makes some users nauseous during certain types of artificial movement. The feeling can now be suppressed artificially. “It is more a question of certification than scientific,” explains Newell.
Perhaps that is why Valve has been so quiet about its post-Valve Index plans – they are working hard on what is to come for the next generation of computer interaction.
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