Valve’s Gabe Newell imagines “editing” personalities with future headsets
"Remember when Bob got hacked by Russian malware [and] ran naked through forests?"
arstechnica.com
Excerpts -
For years, the open secret at Valve (makers of game series like Half-Life and Portal) has been the company's interest in a new threshold of game experiences. We've seen this most prominently with SteamVR as a virtual reality platform, but the game studio has also openly teased its work on "brain-computer interfaces" (BCI)—meaning, ways to read brainwave activity to either control video games or modify those experiences.
Most of what we've seen from Valve's skunkworks divisions thus far, particularly at a lengthy GDC 2019 presentation, has revolved around reading your brain's state (i.e., capturing nervous-system energy in your wrists before it reaches your fingers, to reduce button-tap latency in twitchy shooters like Valve's Counter-Strike). In a Monday interview with New Zealand's 1 News, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell finally began teasing a more intriguing level of BCI interaction: one that changes the state of your brain.
"Our ability to create experiences in people's brains, that aren't mediated through their meat peripherals [e.g., fingers, eyes], will be better than is [currently] possible," Newell asserts as part of his latest 12-minute video interview. Later, he claims that "the real world will seem flat, colorless, and blurry compared to the experiences that you'll be able to create in people's brains."
"But that's not where it gets weird," Newell continues. "Where it gets weird is when who you are becomes editable through a BCI."
"If you're a software developer in 2022 who doesn't have one of these in your test lab, you're making a silly mistake," he adds.
You're used to experiencing the world through eyes, but eyes were created by this low-cost bidder who didn't care about failure rates and RMAs. If [your eye] got broken, there was no way to repair anything effectively. It totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but it's not at all reflective of consumer preferences.
Basically he’s saying silly rabbit, VR is for kids.
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