Here’s a strange input device you don’t see everyday:
It’s the Lightstone for the game Journey To Wild Divine, sponsored by renowned con-artists and fraudsters: Deepak Chopra, and Andrew Weil.
Although portrayed as some kind of magic crystal, it’s actually a USB biofeedback device that measures your pulse, and how much electricity your skin can conduct. Your skin conducts more electricity when you are stressed (because of sweat). With those two readings your computer can know other things, like: how hard you are exercising, how stressed you are, how relaxed you are, how fit you are, and whether you are telling the truth or lying.
The game it originally came with is basically a relaxation game, where you have to go through a variety of relaxation exercises in order to progress.
I hear the game is actually quite fun and useful, if you can tolerate the anti-science bigotry and outright nonsense.
I just added partial support for the LightStone to GlovePIE 0.42, which I’ll be releasing shortly. Currently GlovePIE 0.42 can only read the Skin Conductance Level, and the “Heart Rate Variance” (it goes up to indicate each pulse). I haven’t added code to detect peaks in the HRV yet, so it can’t tell you more useful information like your pulse rate yet (unless you script it yourself).
Actually GlovePIE already supported measuring your heart-rate, if you had a Concept 2 Rowing Machine (“ergo”) connected to your computer by USB.
But the idea of a device that can measure your mental state for game playing is part of a growing trend these days, with the recent release of no less than 3 competing devices that directly measure brainwaves with an EEG: Neuosky’s ThinkGear, Emotiv’s Epoc, and OCZ’s NIA. I’ll talk about them in a coming post.