In an open interview with the New Zealander 1 News, Valbe co-founder Gabe Newell sat down to discuss everything about his future vision for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), and how technology is set to change everything about how we live (and play) today. From the outside, Valve seems to be taking baby steps, but Newell says research is progressing much faster than expected.
Newell was not secretive about his thoughts on BCI, and how it could be an ‘event at every level of extinction for every form of entertainment’. His message to software developers: start thinking now about how to use BCI, as it will soon be important for all aspects of the entertainment industry.
How soon? Newell says in a conversation with News 1 that the studios should be in their testing laboratories by 2022 “simply because there is too much useful data.”
Newell talks about BCI through a patented lens with a consumer-oriented lens – which is understandable from the leading minds behind Steam, the largest digital distribution platform for computer games, and not to mention a fiery pioneer of consumer VR like us do not know today.
For Newell, BCI will allow developers to one day create experiences that feature the traditional “meat peripherals” of yesteryear – eyes, ears, arms and legs – giving users access to richer experiences than the current reality can offer.
‘You’re used to experiencing the world through the eyes, but the eyes were created by this cheap bidder who does not care about failures and RMAs, and if it broke, there was no way to repair something effectively, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but does not at all reflect consumer preferences. So the visual experience, the visual fidelity that we will be able to create – the real world will cease to be the yardstick we apply to the best possible visual fidelity. ”
Towards the more immersive, highly adaptable future, Newell revealed that Valve is taking some important first steps, namely its newly 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 for everyone to have a high resolution [brain signal] read technologies built into headsets, in a bunch of different modalities. ”
Back in November, OpenBCI announced that they were making a BCI specially for VR / AR headphones, called Galea, which was very similar to the way Valve’s chief experimental psychologist dr. Mike Ambinder described in his GDC 2019 vision for VR headsets with electro-enkeogram (EEG) devices.
Although Newell does not go into detail about the partnership, he says BCIs will soon play a fundamental role in game design.
“If you’re a software developer by 2022 and do not have any of them in your testing lab, you’re making a silly mistake,” says Newell. 1 News. “Software developers for interactive experiences – you would absolutely use one of these custom VR headphones to do this regularly – simply because there is too much useful data.”
There is a real laundry list of things that BCI contains could do this in the future by giving software developers access to the brain and letting them ‘edit’ the human experience. Newell has been talking about this for a long time; beyond the hypothetical, Newell says short-term research in the field is so rapid that he is reluctant to commercialize anything for fear of slowing down.
“The pace at which we learn things is so fast that you do not want to say in a timely manner, ‘OK, let’s shut down everything and build a product and go through all the approval processes, when we’ll have something in six months.’ made a lot of other features possible. ”
It’s not sure if Galea is the subject of the partnership, but the alleged capabilities seem to match pretty well what Newell says is going down the road. Gelea is apparently packed with sensors, which contain not only EEG, but also sensors capable of electro-oulography (EOG), electromyography (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA) and photoplethismography (PPG).
OpenBCI says Galea gives researchers and developers a way to measure “human emotions and facial expressions”, which includes happiness, anxiety, depression, attention span and level of interest – many of the data points that can inform game developers on how to create better, more immersive games .
Provided such a high-tech VR headband can ‘read’ emotional states non-intrusively, it will represent a major step in a new direction for gaming. And this is one that Valve clearly intends to leverage, as it still creates (and sells) the most immersive gaming experiences.
Are you interested in watching the entire interview? Capture the video directly News 1’s website.