technologyvista.in: Stanford engineers design video game controller that can read players emotions Stanford engineers have developed what could be the next big thing in interactive gaming: handheld game controllers that measure the players physiology and alter the game play to make it more engaging. Sometimes, a dozen ravenous zombies just arent exciting enough to hold a video gamers interest. The next step in interactive gaming, however, could come in the form of a handheld game controller that gauges the players brain activity and throws more zombies on the screen when it senses that the player is bored. The prototype controller was born from research conducted in the lab of Gregory Kovacs, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, in collaboration with Texas Instruments. The main area of research by grad students in Kovacs lab involves developing practical ways of measuring physiological signals to determine how a persons bodily systems are functioning. One such system of interest to Corey McCall, a doctoral candidate in Kovacs lab, is the autonomic nervous system, the emotional part of the brain – the part that changes when you get excited or bored, happy or sad. This activity, in turn, influences your heart rate, respiration rate, temperature, perspiration and other key bodily processes. Measuring these outward signs offers a way of reverse engineering whats occurring in the brain. You can see the expression of a persons autonomic nervous system in their heart rate and skin temperature and respiration rate, and by measuring those outputs, we can understand whats happening in the brain almost instantaneously, said McCall, the leader on the game controller project. This method of sensing autonomic activity is particularly intriguing, McCall said, because it can be conducted through non-invasive means. In fact, another of his projects involves monitoring the skin temperature of epilepsy patients at Stanford Hospital in an effort to sense the early indicators of a seizure.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 13:45:00 +0000
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