Valve measures sweat during Left 4 Dead play

Jessica Conditt — Tue, 07 May 2013 23:59:00 EST

Valve tinkers with a lot of things - whatever it feels like, mostly - but has a particular interest in biometrics and direct player feedback within games. At the Neurogaming Conference last week, Valve Experimental Psychologist (seriously, whatever if feels like) Mike Ambinder described a few tests he'd recently run, as reported by Venture Beat.

In one test, Valve measured how much players sweat while playing Left 4 Dead, as correlated to their levels of arousal - just as Valve boss Gabe Newell specified back in March, concerning biometrics in the Steam Box. Another experiment gave players four minutes to shoot 100 enemies, and the game would move more quickly as the player showed signs of nervousness.

Valve also created a successful version of Portal 2 controlled with players' eyeballs, but it was necessary to separate aiming and viewpoint - where your eyes are looking and where your head is facing - for that to work properly.

The Steam Box will host some sort of biometric scheme, Newell said in that March interview.

"What we've found is you can directly measure player state and it turns out to be very useful," Newell said. "You need to be able to directly measure how aroused the player is, what their heart rate is, things like that, in order to continue to offer them a new experience each time they play."

Valve measures sweat during Left 4 Dead play originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 07 May 2013 23:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony patents player recognition on sci-fi scale

Mike Suszek — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 13:30:00 EST

A patent Sony filed in May 2012 was recently uncovered, indicating the company has interest in knowing exactly who the users of its products are. The patent, titled "Process and Apparatus for Automatically Identifying User of Consumer Electronics," describes the inclusion of fingerprint sensors that would read biometric data of its users on products such as phones, keyboards and gaming controllers.

The patent's abstract reads, "A user of a device may be uniquely identified using a metric that is contingent upon the user using the device for its intended purpose without the user having to perform a separate step, function or operation for the express purpose of identifying the user." The document continues to elaborate on context-sensitive content that would be automatically generated for users upon identification.

Biometric data has mingled with gaming before, most notably when Nintendo introduced (but did not release) the Vitality Sensor device.

Sony patents player recognition on sci-fi scale originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 23 Sep 2012 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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