Engineers at Stanford University have created video game controllers that can alter the gameplay by sensing the emotions of the players.
The prototype controller was created from the research of Gregory Kovacs, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, according to Laboratory Equipment.
Grad students from Kovac's lab have been working with Texas Instruments on ways to measure physiological signals to find out how a person's bodily systems are working.
Corey McCall, the lead in the project, is responsible for the creation of the autonomic nervous system, which reflects the emotional part of the brain and judges the player's brain activity, CrazyEngineers reported.
This part of the brain changes when a person is happy, sad, bored or excited. The activity influences a person's heart rate, respiration rate, perspiration, temperature and other important bodily processes. Analyzing these signs provides a way to reverse engineer activities in the brain, Laboratory Equipment reported.
"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, a doctoral candidate in Kovac's lab.
McCall found out in his research that he could easily keep track of people in different mental states while they played video games, and that he could obtain most of the necessary data from the hands of the subjects.
McCall replaced the back panel of Xbox 360 with a 3D printed plastic module, which contained different sensors, CrazyEngineers reported. He used small metal pads to monitor and measure the player's heart rate and blood pressure, as well as the rate of breath and how deep the player breathed.
The module featured other sensors, such as an accelerometer, which looked at how much the player shakes the controller, and a light-operated sensor, which also measures heart rate.
The controller received a large amount of positive responses when it was presented by McCall at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, Laboratory Equipment reported. The reception was partially due to the next phase of research, which will focus on using the controller to give feedback to the gaming console, which can improve the gameplay's pace for the player.
