Great Minds Think Alike

The drive to find new and interesting input devices has increased since the development of the Wii-mote showed the industry that people will accept new ways to control games other than the hardware that’s been around for years. While pondering on new ideas myself, I thought about using brainwaves, or rather the output of an EEG (brainwave measurement instrument) as an input device.The idea and partial application has been around for more than 20 years (IBVA : http://www.ibva.com/html/core.htm) but few have ever used it seriously to interact with games.

Further research into the viability of EEG output for my ideas of game control that lie within my programming skills resulted in the conclusion that i would only be able to achieve two dimensional movement control, which would be the product of overall increasing or decreasing brainwave activity.
The data contained within sample output is quite complex and somewhat random (spikes) even if the individual’s state of mind reflects calmness but it would be possible to detect overall trends.
A visual example of someone calming down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nffgMFajFjY&feature=related
Sample ASCII data from a 10 channel EEG recording: 10chEEG (Excel 2007, one channel / line)

Where do I stand now with game design?

I’ve got the option for 2D control of an object. The first thought would be the throttle of a race vehicle. The game I’m thinking of would be a racing game with hovercrafts, one of which the player has to control and navigate around obstacles and of course the race course itself.

Part of the game control mechanics would be based on the following theories:
It seems fairly straight forward to think that for an increase in speed, the player would have to concentrate, therefore increasing his EEG values.
But don’t we already do this for gaming, concentrating, competing by trying to be the quickest thinker? What would happen if the player had to relax in order to gain speed?
This would seem to create a paradox for the player in many ways. The faster he goes, the more difficult it gets to avoid obstacles, therefore he has to concentrate more which in turn will slow him down. If he’s competing against other real players it adds the next layer of contradictory brain function, he doesn’t just want to navigate his car, he also wants to be faster than the others, this of course requires him to relax more than his opponents but in reality the player’s brain is programmed to increase activity for competition.

Another interesting thing to experiment with would be the lighting on the race course, maybe certain colors or strobing light in tunnels or along trees with sun and shadow effects could influence the player’s brain activity.

If the vehicles aren’t invulnerable the fear of crashing, as well as spectacular but surprising explosions of other players, could also add to the challenge.

There should be a training course to let the player experiment and learn this original way of controlling the vehicle. An onboard computer voice could guide the pilot trough the process of acquiring the necessary skills.

Trying to introduce a story into racing games has been attempted but the only believable or relevant to the game play story has been with the latest parts of the Need for Speed series which mimics real world conditions of racing cars in different environments. Those games expanded the gameplay beyond the usual buy car, tune car, race for money by introducing territory conflicts and conflicts with the law and subsequent cop chases.
In most other racing games the story only set the graphical theme of the race course and had no other practical involvement with the game.
Based on that I would suggest to either leave out any sort of story and just make sure that the game is enjoyable to play and watch.
If there was a serious budget it could be possible to acquire the rights to use intellectual property like Star Wars and base all the graphical and some of the usual game elements around the story of the big hovercraft race in one of those episodes.

Concluding that I had a really original idea would have been nice but apparently a team of engineers in Sweden had a very similar idea a few years ago. They didn’t go into as much interactivity as I envisioned for my application but the main principle of relaxing while competing is the base of their product. (http://smart.tii.se/smart/projects/brainball/index_en.html)

One thing is certain, games will make use of EEG output in the very near future.
(http://www.megagames.com/news/html/pc/braincontrolledgamingarealitythisyear.shtml)

---