GabeN Goes Brain-Deep

hanselthecaretaker

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Nov 18, 2010
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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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Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
My friend would love to be involved in this. She loves to game but her hands kinda fail her due to arthritis.
 

09philj

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We're steadily drifting into a future where our ability to devise technology outstrips our ability to apply it in an ethical way.
 

wings012

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Just what I need, the technology to project Futa Fix Dick Dine and Dash straight into the brain.
 

Thaluikhain

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So...they've seen a cyberpunk film and gotten all excited?

Yeah, wake me when it's remotely feasible and/or we don't have more important news.
 

happyninja42

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So...they've seen a cyberpunk film and gotten all excited?

Yeah, wake me when it's remotely feasible and/or we don't have more important news.
Yeah this was my thoughts as well. Yeah, digital/brain interface, welcome to the scifi premise of cyberpunk (the genre, not the game) from like 30 years ago. I mean this isn't even a new idea that people have been working. There ALREADY are brain/tech interfaces, being used in rudimentary fashion for amputees to control cybernetic limbs, and to control devices if they are bed ridden (I recall a guy who had his brain wired so he could control a mouse cursor, as he was in a hospital, and permanently bedridden, it let him have access to internet and other features, and he was very happy with it. ), and other similar things. Because you know, those scientists and engineers, grew up reading this kind of scifi DECADES ago, and, like their previous generations who watched Star Trek and were like (I wanna make that real, thus we got MRI and cell phones, and other technologies), they're doing it now.

So yeah, I fail to see how this is at all some breaking news.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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Yeah this was my thoughts as well. Yeah, digital/brain interface, welcome to the scifi premise of cyberpunk (the genre, not the game) from like 30 years ago. I mean this isn't even a new idea that people have been working. There ALREADY are brain/tech interfaces, being used in rudimentary fashion for amputees to control cybernetic limbs, and to control devices if they are bed ridden (I recall a guy who had his brain wired so he could control a mouse cursor, as he was in a hospital, and permanently bedridden, it let him have access to internet and other features, and he was very happy with it. ), and other similar things. Because you know, those scientists and engineers, grew up reading this kind of scifi DECADES ago, and, like their previous generations who watched Star Trek and were like (I wanna make that real, thus we got MRI and cell phones, and other technologies), they're doing it now.

So yeah, I fail to see how this is at all some breaking news.
Well, compared to what else is being done in the videogame world, it's kinda seems like something more ambitious at the very least and revolutionary at best.
 

happyninja42

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Well, compared to what else is being done in the videogame world, it's kinda seems like something more ambitious at the very least and revolutionary at best.
Honestly though, video game technology has been trailblazing for a lot of other avenues of technology. For example, the rabid demand for high definition, high resolution imaging for video games, has basically helped medical imaging equipment, like MRI's and similar, make HUGE leaps forward in the effectiveness of the scans. And they've cited that video game imaging advances as the cause for it. And some of the doctors that helped initially make MRI, have cited Star Trek's hand held medical scanners as their inspiration. They wanted to make something like that. Obviously it's not that small....yet, but the idea spurred them to try and make it reality. So to me, it's all just a chicken/egg kind of thing. Scifi of all mediums, has been feeding off real tech, expanding on it to theorize crazy new things, and then the next gen of nerds see that stuff, and are like "oh shit, I totally want to make that real!" . they get pretty close (or make something entirely different but also awesome), and then scifi creators see that and go "oh shit, I totally want to use that in my story!" and on it goes.