BombermanBoard

DragonBomber · #2 Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 11:37 pm

In the future it's possible. Your brain does certain things when it repeats certain actions with a controller. Your brain and the controller even sometimes disconnects so you end up failing at your objective, with hand-eye coordination being something learned that improves the chances of this not happening as often. Those places that see action, the misc neurons and logic portions and other places where what you decide to do or think about shows up can be mapped enough to make this work in a controlled setting. The pong like game for example takes practice but can be managed well enough. I think it all takes a reference point no matter how you do it.

This is similar but different to how those control schemes to type using an on screen keyboard for people who cannot move, work. Tracking where the eye normally rests versus where the eyes is moving. A game character can easily be moved in this manner. Say your character stays centered on your view be default, in a first person shooter. The eye would be tracking where to go in relation to that initial XYZ point. A rolling blink forward could indicate walking forward or say two large blinks be the key to starting and stopping to walk, with the direction you're looking being the new Z point on the grid if X and Y was the same. Any number of verbal cues that a user can train software and a camera to pick up on could be used. The more rules you set, the more control options you have. A versed player could use one eye for camera/aim and one eye for movement for example, or some cue to switch between the two.

Whether it's the brain's own neural firing triggering the software or the eyes tracking and behaving to cue it, it has been shown to be possible. An absolute will fail opinion is usually not the one that wins the stock market or innovation race. If you asked me back in the days when I sat playing my Atari 2600 that some day games would look and play the way they do, I'd have been in awe but would have been open to the possibilities. Perhaps this particular project will fail, but the control of software with the mind and a whole slew of other similar technologies is in the pipeline of the future. No doubt about that. It might get perfected when you are an old man having survived the zombie plague, and I am in the ground a dead zombie, or it might get perfected by the time the zombies come and raze the world and we're both fighting them shotgun style. No telling.

The brain is a magical thing, and controlling things with our minds has been a desired end for a lot of people for many years. It might not show up like the skullcaps in Strange Days or as the mental upgrade in Johnny Mnemonic but I have little doubt once the brain is understood even more, people will spend a lot of money developing technology to fork around inside it. They already do, and some of those results are used for misc purpose in diagnosing conditions or trying to predict behavior. A poor opening use perhaps, but it has to start somewhere. Look at where videogames began: the original Oddysey from Ralph Baer worked on while he was employed by the government. One of his tradeshow proto boxes ran a primitive Table Tennis software that Nolan Bushnell "borrowed" the idea for use in his Pong game from, which resulted in him ultimately having to pay Baer for after losing in court. So much technology starts off in a crude manner with little promise except the hype, and some of it blooms in time.

Just my opinion though. I don't think anything is impossible at this point in my life. hehe