Stanford developed game controller that can sense players’ emotions

stanford-engineers-game-controller-that-can-sense-players-emotions

Stanford engineers have developed what could be the next big thing in interactive gaming: handheld game controllers that measure the player's physiology and alter the gameplay to make it more engaging.

The prototype controller was born from research conducted in the lab of Gregory Kovacs, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, in collaboration with Texas Instruments. The main area of research by grad students in Kovacs' lab involves developing practical ways of measuring physiological signals to determine how a person's bodily systems are functioning.

One such system of interest to Corey McCall, a doctoral candidate in Kovacs' lab, is the autonomic nervous system, the emotional part of the brain – the part that changes when you get excited or bored, happy or sad. This activity, in turn, influences your heart rate, respiration rate, temperature, perspiration and other key bodily processes. Measuring these outward signs offers a way of reverse engineering what's occurring in the brain.

"You can see the expression of a person's autonomic nervous system in their heart rate and skin temperature and respiration rate, and by measuring those outputs, we can understand what's happening in the brain almost instantaneously," said McCall, the leader on the game controller project.

This method of sensing autonomic activity is particularly intriguing, McCall said, because it can be conducted via non-invasive means. In fact, another of his projects involves monitoring the skin temperature of epilepsy patients at Stanford Hospital in an effort to sense the early indicators of a seizure.

As McCall worked out other ways to measure autonomic activity, he realized that he could easily monitor people in various mental states as they played video games and that he could gather most of the data he needed straight from test subjects' hands.

YouTube video

Video courtesy of Stanford University

McCall popped the back panel off an Xbox 360 controller and replaced it with a 3-D printed plastic module packed with sensors. Small metal pads on the controller's surface measure the user's heart rate, blood flow, and both the rate of breath and how deeply the user is breathing. Another light-operated sensor gives a second heart rate measurement, and accelerometers measure how frantically the person is shaking the controller.

"If a player wants maximum engagement and excitement, we can measure when they are getting bored and, for example, introduce more zombies into the level," McCall said. "We can also control the game for children. If parents are concerned that their children are getting too wrapped up in the game, we can tone it down or remind them that it's time for a healthy break."

Source: Stanford University

Featured image credit: Standford University

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