Dota 2 Tournament trophies may appear if Valve boss Gabe Newell further forces research into the brain-computer interface (BCI). “/>Getty Images / David Jackmanson / Sam Machkovech
For years, Valve’s open secret (creators of game series like Half life and Portal) has been the company’s interest in a new level of gaming experiences. We saw this most prominently with SteamVR as a virtual reality platform, but the game studio also openly sparked its work on “brain-computer interfaces” (BCI) – that is, ways to read brainwave activity to control video games or modify these experiences.
Most of what we’ve seen from Valve’s skunkworks divisions so far, particularly in a long presentation at GDC 2019, revolved around reading the state of your brain (that is, capturing the energy of the nervous system in your wrists before reaching to the fingers, to reduce touch the latency in restless snipers like Valve Counterattack) In a Monday interview with New Zealand newspaper 1 News, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell finally started to provoke a more intriguing level of BCI interaction: one that changes the state of his brain.
“Our ability to create experiences in people’s brains, which are not mediated through their peripherals [e.g., fingers, eyes], it will be better than it is [currently] possible, ”says Newell as part of his last 12-minute video interview. He later says that “the real world will appear flat, colorless and blurry compared to the experiences you will be able to create in people’s brains.”
“But that’s not where it gets weird,” continues Newell. “What is strange is when you are editable through a BCI.”
How many years until the tentacles?
As an example, Newell plays out a casual mood: “I’m feeling unmotivated today.” He envisions a world where such a state of being is no longer seen as “a fundamental personality trait that is relatively untreatable to change” and changes to “feed-forward and feedback loops on who you want to be.”
Or, more clearly, “Oh, I’m going to increase my focus now. My mood must be it is. “
Newell sometimes uses the phrase “science fiction” when describing this possible future driven by BCI, along with open references to The Matrix series of films. But he also has a sales pitch example of how conventional acceptance might begin: with brain-control apps, whose interfaces resemble modern phone apps, for impulses like easier sleep.
That’s how I want to sleep now.
“Sleep will become an application that you run, in which you insert: ‘I need so much sleep, so much REM’,” says Newell. “Instead of fluffing pillows or taking Zolpidem, I’ll just say, this is how I want to sleep now.” From there, satisfied users will tell their friends about, say, sleeping during 12-hour flights “completely refreshed with my circadian rhythm,” he estimates.
Newell uses a personal story to illustrate why he believes the brain’s perspective is so malleable: he had corneal transplant surgery over a decade ago, which changed his perception of color between the two eyes. When his surgery corrected how his eyes saw colors, he “disturbed this relationship” in his brain and created images duplicated by ghosts until he got used to the change over a period of a few weeks.
Where do you go from there, if the brains are so fungible? Newell mentions Valve’s work in synthetic hands as a collaboration with other researchers and then adds: “As soon as you do that, you say, ‘Oh, can you give people a tentacle?’ So you think, ‘Oh, brains were never designed to have tentacles’, but it turns out that brains are really flexible. “Why Newell immediately jumped into tentacles like a fantasy appendage is beyond us, but, hey.
In the short term, brain production before brain input
During this superficial-level interview, however, Newell is careful not to estimate when this manipulation of brain input may have an effect on the market. In fact, he makes it clear that he is in no hurry to make this happen, saying: “The rate we are learning is so fast that we don’t want to say prematurely, ‘Let’s block everything and build a product,’ when in six months, something to enable a lot of other features. “
Instead, he uses the opportunity to confirm significant progress on “modified RV head bands” that include “high resolution reading technologies”. In other words, Valve wants to capture users ‘brainwave activity more immediately, whether in terms of reducing button press latency or understanding how players’ moods change during a game or application, and placing that device on the market. Newell admits that it is more about creating a platform for game and software developers to “start thinking about these issues” before second and third generation BCI products.
“If you’re a software developer in 2022 and you don’t have one in your test lab, you’re making a silly mistake,” he adds.
We are still waiting to hear more about Galea, a headset platform operated by the open source collective OpenBCI with significant contributions from Valve, which may well be the first “high resolution reading technology” headset in line with Newell’s proclamations about near-future BCI gaming options.
In terms of measuring the nervous system, Galea can include EEG, EMG, EDA, PPG and eye tracking as options. It is not clear whether, say, your EEG system would require a perfect connection to your scalp, or if any of your other measurement systems is particularly invasive. Still, we imagine that Galea as a whole will be less invasive than Neuralink, the neuroscientific product led by Elon Musk that starts with a microchip connected directly to the human brain.
Try not to “take consumer acceptance to a precipice”
The most interesting parts of the interview are the much more forward-looking, in which Newell goes so far as to give a hint of playing God. If you think this is overkill, look at this quote:
You are used to experiencing the world through the eyes, but the eyes were created by this low-cost bidder who did not care about failure rates and RMAs. What if [your eye] broke, there was no way to fix anything effectively. It makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective, but in no way reflects consumer preferences.
Newell is careful to moderate these bold statements with the reality of entrusting his confidential data to major technology companies. If modern manipulators of your financial and personal data mess up, Newell points out, “they will take consumer acceptance off the cliff.” Nor does he imagine a world where everyone feels obliged to use BCIs, just as modern life does not necessarily require smartphones.
The same scrutiny would apply to potentially invasive BCIs, says Newell. “‘Nobody means’ Ah, you know, remember Bob? Remember when Bob was hacked by Russian malware? Man, that sucked; is he still running naked through the woods?’ … People will have to do that a lot confidence that these are safe systems that pose no long-term health risks. ”
Newell is also careful not to go into more detail about exactly how a complete read / write BCI would synchronize with users or whether they would need Neuralink-scale surgery – which could well explain their choice not to estimate any window. launch the foreseeable future.
For the full interview, go to 1 News for your comprehensive report.