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In a candid interview with New Zealand 1 News, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell sat down to talk about his future vision for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), and how technology is changing everything in the way we live (and let’s play) today. From the outside, it looks like Valve is taking baby steps, but Newell says the research is going much faster than expected.
Newell has made no secret of his thoughts on BCI, and how it could be an “extinction level event for every form of entertainment.” His message to software developers: start thinking about how to use BCI right now, as it will be important to all aspects of the entertainment industry very soon.
How long? Newell said in a conversation with News 1 that by 2022, studios should have them in their test labs “just because there is too much useful data”.
Newell talks about BCI through an obviously tinted consumer lens – understandable from the eminent mind behind Steam, the largest digital distribution platform for PC games, and not to mention a staunch pioneer of grand VR. public as we know it today.
For Newell, BCI will allow developers to one day create experiences that completely bypass the traditional “meat devices” of yesteryear – the eyes, ears, arms and legs – giving users access to experiences richer than the today’s reality is able to provide.
“You are used to seeing 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 was broken he didn’t ‘There was no way to fix anything effectively, which totally makes it in an evolutionary perspective, but does not reflect consumer preferences at all. So the visual experience, the visual fidelity that we can create – the real world will cease to be the metric that we apply to the best visual fidelity possible. “
On the road to this more immersive and highly adaptive future, Newell revealed that Valve is taking important first steps, namely its recently revealed partnership with OpenBCI, the neurotech company behind a fleet of open-source, non-invasive BCI devices.
Newell says the partnership is working to provide a way that “everyone can have high resolution [brain signal] read the technologies built into headsets, in a lot of different ways. “
In November, OpenBCI announced that it was making a BCI specifically for VR / AR headsets, called Galea, which sounded very similar to how Valve’s senior experimental psychologist, Dr Mike Ambinder, described in his GDC 2019 vision for VR headsets equipped with electroencephalogram (EEG) devices.
While Newell doesn’t go into details on the partnership, he says BCIs are set to play a fundamental role in game design for the very near future.
“If you’re a software developer in 2022 and you don’t have one in your test lab, you’re making a stupid mistake,” Newell says 1 News. “Software developers for interactive experiences – you’ll absolutely use one of those modified VR headbands to do it on a regular basis – just because there’s too much payload.”
There is a real BCI to-do list could do so in the future by giving software developers access to the brain and letting them “edit” the human experience. Newell has already spoken about it at length; aside from assumptions, Newell says short-term research in the field is so rapid that he is hesitant to commercialize anything for fear of slowing down.
“The speed at which we learn things is so fast that you don’t want to say prematurely, ‘OK, we’re going to lock everything down and create a product and go through all the approval processes, whereas in six months we will have something. thing that would have activated a bunch of other features. “
It’s not certain that Galea is the subject of the partnership, but her purported abilities seem to line up pretty well with what Newell says on the road. Gelea would be packed with sensors, which include not only EEG, but also sensors capable of electrooculographic electromyography (EOG) (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and photoplethysmography (PPG).
OpenBCI claims that Galea gives researchers and developers a way to measure “human emotions and facial expressions,” which include happiness, anxiety, depression, attention span and level of interest – many data points that could inform game developers on how to create better, more immersive games.
Provided such a high-tech VR headband could ‘read’ emotional states non-invasively, that would represent a big step in a new direction for the game. And this is one that Valve clearly has. ‘intent to exploit while continuing to create (and sell) the most immersive gaming experiences possible.
Want to watch the entire interview? Watch the video directly on News 1 website.
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