In a candid interview with New Zealand 1 news item, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell sat down to talk all about his future vision for brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and how technology is set up to change everything about how we live (and play) today. From the outside, it looks like Valve is taking baby steps, however, Newell says research is going much faster than anticipated.
Newell did not hide his thoughts on BCI and how it could be an “extinction event for all forms of entertainment”. Your message to software developers: Start thinking about how to use BCI now, because it will be important to all aspects of the entertainment industry soon.
How long? Newell said in a conversation with News 1 that by 2022, studios should have them in their test labs “simply because there is so much useful data”.
Newell talks about BCI through colored consumer lenses – understandable coming from a prominent mind behind Steam, the largest digital distribution platform for PC games, not to mention an ardent consumer VR pioneer as we know it today .
For Newell, BCI will allow developers to one day create experiences that completely bypass the traditional “carnal peripherals” of the old in function – eyes, ears, arms and legs – giving users access to experiences richer than today’s reality is capable of. to provide.
“You’re used to experiencing the world through the eyes, but the eyes were created by this low-cost bidder who didn’t care about failure rates and RMAs, and if he broke down, there was no way to fix anything effectively, which makes it totally meaningful from an evolutionary perspective, but in no way reflects consumer preferences. Therefore, the visual experience, the visual fidelity that we will be able to create – the real world will no longer be the metric that we apply for the best possible visual fidelity. “
On the way to this more engaging and highly adaptable future, Newell revealed that Valve is taking some important first steps, namely its recently revealed partnership with OpenBCI, the neurotechnology company behind a fleet of open source and non-open source BCI devices. invasive.
Newell says the partnership is working to provide a way for “everyone to have high resolution [brain signal] read technologies embedded in headphones, in a lot of different modes. “
In November, OpenBCI announced that it was making a BCI specifically for VR / AR headsets, called Galea, which looked very similar to how Valve’s leading experimental psychologist, Dr. Mike Ambinder, described in his vision GDC 2019 for headsets VR ear equipped with electroencephalogram (EEG) devices.
Although Newell does not elaborate on the partnership, he says that BCIs should play a key role in game design in the very near future.
“If you’re a software developer in 2022 who doesn’t have one of these in your test lab, you’re making a silly mistake,” says Newell 1 News. “Software developers for interactive experiences – you will absolutely use one of these modified RV head strips to do this routinely – simply because there is a lot of useful data.”
There is a real laundry list of BCI things could in the future, giving software developers access to the brain and letting them ‘edit’ the human experience. Newell has talked about this at length; out of the blue, Newell says that short-term research in the field is so fast that he hesitates to market anything for fear of slowing down.
“The rate at which we’re learning things is so fast that you don’t want to say prematurely, ‘OK, let’s just block everything and build a product and go through all the approval processes, when in six months, we will have something that would enable a lot of other resources. “
It is not certain whether Galea is the object of the partnership, however, his alleged capabilities seem to align very well with what Newell says is emerging. Gelea is reportedly packed with sensors, which include not only EEG, but also sensors capable of electrooculography (EOG), electromyography (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and photoplethysmography (PPG).
OpenBCI says Galea offers researchers and developers a way to measure “human emotions and facial expressions”, which includes happiness, anxiety, depression, attention and level of interest – many of the data points that can inform game developers about how create better, more engaging games.
As long as a high-tech VR headstrap could “read” emotional states in a non-invasive way, it would represent a big step in a new direction for games. And it is something that Valve clearly intends to take advantage of as it continues to create (and sell) the most engaging gaming experiences possible.
Interested in watching the full interview? Watch the video directly on News 1’s on the Internet network.