Science in the Triangle

Barriers to entry?

It took about two years for me to rid my home of the redundant technology that is the DVD player.

During that time, these devices bit the dust one by one as my Xbox 360 sat underutilized in my entertainment center. But when the third and final DVD player refused to do my bidding, I was fed up.

Microsoft never had to convince me to use its next-generation console as the center of my entertainment setup. I’ve grown up with video games, so the idea of using a complicated controller to manipulate the playback of everything from music to movies never fazed me.

But for my wife, whose only foray into gaming was a brief flirtation with Donkey Kong Country, it was a bit of a hard sell.

Her hesitation is natural and understandable.

For all companies have done to recruit the “casual gamer,” be it immersive environments or intuitive gameplay, these 10-plus-button controllers still represent the final barriers to entry for the gaming world.

In 2006, Nintendo’s Wii remote was an attempt to mitigate that barrier to entry — and it certainly seems to be working. Worldwide, the Wii has sold 73.4 million units, according to the gaming tracking service VGChartz. That’s 6 million units short of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sales combined.

Microsoft’s Kinect and PlayStation’s Move are new entries to the field due out this Christmas season.

But Research Triangle Park firm RTI International has something with the potential to change the controller game. It’s called Mindshift, and it was developed in collaboration with NASA’s Langley Research Center. From the release:

“Mindshift allows modulation of player inputs to a video game or simulation from a user interface device based on the player’s psychophysiological state. It exploits current wireless motion-sensing technologies to use physiological signals for input modulation, including heart rate, muscle tension and brain wave activity, among others.”

RTI’s press release says the technology has been “successfully prototyped” using the Wii remote and that researchers are also working on compatibility with Kinect and Move.

Developers will likely put that success to the test when they demo the technology at two separate events at the end of September, one for the public, the other for potential investors.

Regardless of how well Mindshift works, one thing is clear: there’s big incentive to breaking down gaming’s last barrier to entry.

Tyler Dukes is a freelance reporter and journalism adviser at N.C. State University. Follow him on Twitter as @mtdukes.