Heres a new idea

#1 This would be a lot of fun for survival horror games like Illbleed or Clock Tower.

#2 Ya, and ocourse you would have to come up with an advanced card that has that and an added feature with somthing like varible shocks for when you get hit or shot (lol) which could make you get very good at the game fast

#3 Isn't there software that does this through voice and video feed?

Or what about something like this USB heartrate monitor.

It'd be curious how you'd implement it into gameplay.

#4 "It'd be curious how you'd implement it into gameplay."


Thats easy

If their hearts racing for X amount of time, then it's to hard and they are struggling and your server backs down the enemy intensity a little bit at a time till things are stable.

If their heart is slowing down,and hits a level near sleep, then its to easy an everything needs to be notched up a little at a timel.


And when they come home stressed from work and pissed at their boss and their blood pressure is soaring, the computer would automatically be fooled into thinking this person is about to die from heart attack, and it would drop the skill level of everything to minimum and he would bash and trash everything in his way till his anger was satisfied, lol. And he would feel much better actually thinking he had just kicked some serious butt for once in his life. DOH!!!!

#5 Who can fake a heart attack first!

#6 I can see a sudden run on NoDoze to keep that heart rate up.

#7 There's a whole niche market for these types of games based on biofeedback, which generally covers two categories.

First, there's biofeedback games based on heart rate -- these can be little arcade games or more full blown professionally developed adventure titles. The general premise is that you have to keep your heart rate down to progress through the levels, thus teaching you to control your heartrate.

Next, there's biofeedback games based on brainwave patterns. These have been used to treat kids for stuff like ADD. The premise is that you have to relax deeper and deeper to achieve a lower brainwave pattern to progress through the level. Some of the more advanced games even have you switching between different levels at will -- up and down, up and down. Again, this teaches you to control your brainwaves and thus your mental state/concentration. Just like a Jedi.

Many biofeedback devices have software developers kits. You can see a sample flowchart here:


Now, you might be thinking what good would developing a game using these devices be because the market would be so small. Yes, the market is small, but the cost of your game would be significantly higher than $20-$50, and if you included the hardware, installation, ongoing support, and a killer marketing presentation to sell it directly to clinics, you might be onto something. Not my forte, but it may interest someone out there. It's certainly an area the big developers will never touch.

#8 Awe cripes! i had no idea, thats cool.

You would have to down play somthing like that but still offer the feature, or somthing like that

#9 A few years ago there was a device which attached either to each palm
or to the temples, i think it was the temples,
which allowed the wearer to steer a box around the screen in two dimensions
just by thinking about it. not kidding. it was pretty rudimentary and needed
a bit of training, but that was a couple years ago. maybe it's further along.

i think i read about it in Science News magazine, circa 1999 ?

#10 Prety cool stuff!

#11 I saw some software a couple years ago that went by your voice through a microphone. It even had an SDK to write your own programs with.
I'll post something if I can find it again.

#12 @Orion: They have games based on that technology now. Not much more advanced, but it's gotten a little better. I've seen skiing games, and one where the player went through a neverending tunnel that changed in speed and appearance depending on the player's state of mind(they also had to control steering and speed through it).

#13 @ted - huh!
are they pitched more as mind-conditioning products or games that are fun in their own right ?

#14 There was a ps2 game called LifeLine that came out laster year / earlier this year that was played completely through giving voice commands to the character on screen. It was a Resident Evil survival horror type game.

#15 @Orion: Fun games that you use your mind to control. There's probably some mind-conditioning products out there as well, though for me, there would have to be a book accompanying it with research telling the user how to condition their mind, and to what end. That's a hazy area, and probably better suited towards meditation, which you can't really achieve watching things on a screen, IMHO.

@Tim: I heard about that game, and it did get some good reviews, aside from the obvious technical glitches associated with voice commands popping up.

#16 Talking about interfacing brains (of whatever sort) and technology:

'Brain' in a dish flies flight simulator

I thought that was pretty fascinating.

#17 Haha, I read that too. Pretty cool, though it doesn't say much for my inability to do well with flight sims ;)

One more thing... Here's a link to an expo in January in Florida(that Jay Moore is going to be at according to the site), where the military, game, and entertainment industry is all meeting up.

If anything, stuff like biometric control systems would be an area of interest to the military, which is always on the look-out for better technology to deploy(and if you've ever dealt with the M16's near-constant jamming, you'd know why). Someone can make serious money off researching this-even though there's plenty of groups already doing so, but there's always room for one more...

Depending on how horrendous or not my financial state is at the time, I might just go, as there's some stuff myself and my brother would like to get funding to do research on.

#18 I can modify my heart rate by thinking about it. Is that considered cheating? We have a heart rate monitor at work and I wanted to see how low I could drop my heart rate. I can get it to go below 45 beats per second. Funny thing is that the monitor at work alarms at 45 beats per second and lower. They had to disable the alarm on the machine because of me.

Hehe!

#19 Hah-
i had a job for a while testing heart rate and blood oxygenation monitors.
i also got pretty good and decreasing or increasing my heartrate just by thinking,
and also nearly passed out several times from holding my breath.
or so it seemed. these were not requirements of the job.
good times. good times.

#20 Yeh and the best part would be the big nast needles hooked up onto the wires that have t be inserted under the fingernails... Hehe quite a interesting idea but it would need too many components to play I think...

Max :)