New device 'uses emotions to play games'

http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/New-device-uses-emotions-to-play-games/2007/03/12/1173548082973.htmlEmail Print Normal font Large font March 12, 2007 - 2:29PM(By. Lily)

In a world where gamers can spend days on end intimately coupled to their PCs, one Australian company is seeking to intensify the relationship between man and machine.
Emotiv Systems has shifted its main headquarters from Sydney to San Francisco as it moves to secure support for a mind-reading device it believes will profoundly change the way humans interact with computers.
The fledgling business has secured about $6.3 million in venture capital and Australian government grants for the marketing of the Emotiv Development Kit (EDK), a product the company is initially pitching at game developers.
The kit, recently unveiled at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, includes the company's headset, dubbed Project Epoc, a device able to detect electrical activity in the brain.
The EDK reads these signals and interpolates them into meaningful information - in other words, it can read a limited vocabulary of thoughts and emotions.
The kit comprises three applications known as Expressiv, Affectiv and Cognitiv.
Expressiv can also work out a user's facial expression, recreating this on the face of an "avatar" - a graphical representation of a user.
The intent is to make the social networking experience in platforms such as Second Life more natural.
Emotiv chief product officer Randy Breen, previously product development head at LucasArts, says advances in the way the gaming industry currently works are driving the project.
"The problem is that graphics and sound have improved dramatically to a point where the improvements are becoming more subtle and the costs to support them are making it more difficult to find profit for the developers," Breen says.
"There's pressure on where the innovation is coming from.
"Historically, the game controller hasn't changed very much over a long period of time so that in recent years we've started to see more unusual hardware coming to market."
Breen describes Expressiv as a significantly more advanced take on "emotes", symbols that users employ to convey a feeling or action over the electronic written medium.
Users will be able to communicate not just conscious intent but more immediate non-conscious responses such as laughter, smiling or wincing.
"Emotes do that to some extent now but it's really different when there's a barrier that requires you to consciously think about communicating laughing," Breen says.
"Communicating that text and then sending it off and the other person reads it - the reaction to that is not as immediate, not as real."