Brain-controlled VR Porn? Possibly in 2022. Galea is Coming!

Ready to steer virtual reality porn with your brain? The future is closer than it may seem! Some time ago Valve co-founder Gabe Newell revealed Valve was working on a brain-computer interface (BCI) with OpenBCI – the minds behind open-source BCI software and hardware solutions. Now Tobii, the eye-tracking firm, announced it is also a partner on the project and that developer kits incorporating eye-tracking and “design elements” of Valve Index are expected to first ship sometime early next year. How soon? Newell says in a talk with News 1 that by 2022, studios should have them in their test labs “simply because there is too much useful data.” Does it mean that next year we could all be able to run some of these interactive virtual reality porn experiences like Dezyred via our brains? Or maybe all VR porn movies will be like that in the future? This is so exciting! [caption id="attachment_162315" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Gabe Newell (co-founder of Valve) and Mike Ambinder (psychologist ) | Image courtesy of Valve[/caption] Newell speaks about BCI through a patently consumer-tinted lens – understandable coming from a prominent mind behind Steam, the largest digital distribution platform for PC gaming, and not to mention an ardent pioneer of consumer VR as we know it today. To Newell, BCI will allow developers to one day create experiences that completely bypass the traditional “meat-peripherals” of old in function – eyes, ears, arms, and legs – giving users access to richer experiences than today’s reality is capable of providing. “You’re used to experiencing the world through eyes, but eyes were created by this low-cost bidder that didn’t care about failure rates and RMAs, and if it got broken there was no way to repair anything effectively, which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is not at all reflective of consumer preferences. So the visual experience, the visual fidelity we’ll be able to create — the real world will stop being the metric that we apply to the best possible visual fidelity.” On the road to that more immersive, highly-adaptive future, Newell revealed Valve is taking some important first steps, namely its newly revealed partnership with OpenBCI – the neurotech company behind a fleet of open-source, non-invasive BCI devices. He says the partnership is working to provide a way so “everybody can have high-resolution read technologies built into headsets, in a bunch of different modalities.” Back in November, OpenBCI announced it was making a BCI specifically for VR/AR headsets, called Galea, which sounded very similar to how Valve’s Principal Experimental Psychologist Dr. Mike Ambinder described in his GDC 2019 vision for VR headsets fitted with electroencephalogram (EEG) devices. Does this vision stand for the future of VR porn videos? Well, perhaps – so far all the latest technological novelties have been sooner or later implemented in our niche of the market, so we are hoping that this one will catch up with us and our VR porn movies at some point, too! [caption id="attachment_162313" align="aligncenter" width="640"] OpenBCI hardware | Image courtesy of OpenBCI[/caption] Although Newell does not go into detail about the partnership, he says that BCIs are set to play a fundamental role in game design in the very near future. “If you’re a software developer in 2022 who doesn’t have one of these in your test lab, you’re making a silly mistake,” Newell tells 1 News. “Software developers for interactive experiences – you’ll be absolutely using one of these modified VR head straps to be doing that routinely – simply because there’s too much useful data.” There is a veritable laundry list of things BCI could do in the future by giving software developers access to the brain, and letting them “edit” the human experience. Newell has already talked about this at length; outside of the hypotheticals, Newell says near-term research in the field is so fast-paced, that he is hesitant to commercialize anything for the fear of slowing down.“The rate at which we’re learning stuff is so fast that you don’t want to prematurely say, ‘OK, let’s just lock everything down and build a product and go through all the approval processes, when six months from now, we’ll have something that would have enabled a bunch of other features.” It is not certain whether Galea is the subject of the partnership, however, its purported capabilities seem to line up fairly well with what Newell says is coming down the road. Galea is reportedly packed with sensors, which not only includes EEG, but also sensors capable of electrooculography (EOG) electromyography (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and photoplethysmography (PPG). OpenBCI says Galea gives researchers and developers a way to measure “human emotions and facial expressions” which includes happiness, anxiety, depression, attention span, and interest level – many of the data points that could inform game developers on how to create better and more immersive games. Provided such a high-tech VR head strap could non-invasively “read” emotional states, it would represent a big step in a new direction not only for gaming but for other kinds of VR entertainment, too. Does that concern VR porn experiences? Well, premium VR porn movie producers like VR Bangers can only count on it!

The full version of this interview can be found here. This article has been written with the use of data from roadtovr.com.