How should real-time analysis be defined in physiological computing?

Admin: Please welcome to the site our new Physiological Computing blogger.

Greetings my name is Alexander Karran and I am a PhD student at the Liverpool John Moore’s School of Natural Science and Psychology, under the supervision of Dr Stephen Fairclough. I will be working towards a research goal of developing a framework for real-time classifications of certain vectors of affect, using ambulatory body sensor networks under the umbrella of psychophysiology. This work will be multidisciplinary in nature, borrowing from and contributing to, computer science, e-health, psychology and affective computing.
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Physiological Computing, Challenges for Developers and Users.

I recently received a questionnaire from the European Parliament, or rather its STOA panel with respect to developments in physiological computing and implications for social policy. The European Technology Assessment Group (ETAG) is working on a study with the title “Making Perfect Life” which includes a section on biocybernetic adaptation as well as BCI as other kinds of “assistive” technology. The accompanying email told me the questionnaire would take half-an-hour to complete (it didn’t) but they asked some interesting questions, particularly surrounding the view of the general public about this technology and issues surrounding data protection.

I’ve included a slightly-edited version of the questionnaire with my responses. Questions are in italics.
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Biometrics and evaluation of gaming experience part two: a thought experiment

Recent posts on the blog have concerned the topic of psychophysiology (or biometrics) and the evaluation of player experience. Based on those posts and the comments that followed, I decided to do a thought experiment.

Imagine that I work for a big software house who want to sell as many games as possible and ensure that their product (which costs on average $3-5 million to develop per platform) is as good as it possibly can be – and one of the suits from upstairs calls and asks me “how should we be using biometrics as part of our user experience evaluation? The equipment is expensive, its labour-intensive to analyse and nobody seems to understand what the data means.” (This sentiment is not exaggerated, I once presented a set of fairly ambiguous psychophysiological data to a fellow researcher who nodded purposefully and said “So the physiology stuff is voodoo.”)

Here’s a list of 10 things I would push for by way of a response.

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CHI 2011 Workshop – NASA does Biofeedback Gaming on the Wii

In our final workshop video Alan Pope presents “Movemental”: Integrating Movement and the Mental Game (PDF). For the uninitiated Alan Pope co-authored a paper back in the early 90’s which introduced the concept of bio-cybernetic adaptation which has become a key work for us in the field of Physiological Computing. It was with much excitement that we received a paper submission from Alan and it was great to have him talk shop at the event.

Alan’s latest work with his colleague Chad Stephens described several new methods of adapting controller interfaces using physiology, in this case a Wii game controller. I was going to release the original footage I recorded during the workshop, however the camera failed to pick up any of the game demo’s that were shown. As one of my particular research fancies are biofeedback based game mechanics (e.g. lie-detection, sword fighting) I’ve remade the video with Alan’s permission using his power point presentation and so the demo’s can be enjoyed in all their glory.

(Pope, A., Stephens, C.) “Movemental”: Integrating Movement and the Mental Game (PDF)

A videogame or simulation may be physiologicallymodulated to enhance engagement by challenging the user to achieve a target physiological state. A method and several implementations for accomplishing this are described.

So that’s the end of our workshop video series. I hope you’ve all enjoyed them, for now I’m going to hibernate for a month to recover from the editing process.

Physiological Game Interaction and Psychophysiological Evaluation in Research and Industry

Admin: Please welcome to the site our new Physiological Computing bloggger, Dr. Lennart Nacke.

Hi, I am Lennart Nacke and will merge my affectivegaming.info blogging efforts from now on into the Physiological Computing blog (sometimes you can also catch my blogging at Gamasutra and on my own homepage). And I have been promising Kiel and Steve to post here for almost a year now (we have organized a workshop together in the meantime), so I was overdue with this post.

In the above video, you can see my talk about the current directions in physiological game interaction and psychophysiological game evaluation. I have been deeply interested in those topics for at least the past five years, spanning my PhD and postdoc time, several presentations for research institutions and game companies, a growing list of publications, and other articles. In the meantime, physiological sensors have become much cheaper and today we are seeing companies like Neurosky and Emotiv with low-cost physiological sensor products reaching a large amount of customers. My colleague Mike Ambinder at Valve is now even looking into applications of biofeedback input for commercial game titles (PDF) some of this was demonstrated at GDC 2011). So, this is definitely an exciting field to work in. For the rest of this article (which reproduces parts of my workshop paper), I will recapture my CHI workshop talk and discuss some of the applications for game interaction and game evaluation from a Physiological Computing side.
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Biometrics, Game Evaluation and User XP: Approach with caution

This post represents some thoughts on the use of psychophysiology to evaluate the player experience during a computer game. As such, it’s tangential to the main business of this blog, but it’s a topic that I think is worth some discussion and debate, as it raises a whole bunch of pertinent issues for the design of physiological computer games.

Psychophysiological methods are combined with computer games in two types of context: applied psychology research and game evaluation in a commercial context. With respect to the former, a researcher may use a computer game as a platform to study a psychological concept, such as effects of game play on aggression or how playing against a friend or a stranger influences the experience of the player (see this recent issue of Entertainment Computing for examples). In both cases, we’re dealing with the application of an experimental psychology methodology to an issue where the game is used as a task or virtual world within which to study behaviour. The computer game merely represents an environment or context in which to study human behaviour. This approach is characterised by several features: (1) comparisons are made between carefully controlled conditions, (2) statistical power is important (if you want to see your work published) so large numbers of participants are run through the design, (3) selection of participants is carefully controlled (equal number of males and females, comparative age ranges if groups are compared) and (4) counterbalanced designs, i.e. if participants play 2 different games, half of them play game 1 then game 2 whilst the other half play game 2 and then game 1; this is important because the order in which games are presented often influences the response of the participants.
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CHI 2011 Workshop – Session 4 “Sharing the Physiological Experience” Videos Online

This week see’s the release of the talks presented during the Sharing the Physiological Experience session. To view these talks and more please click here. For guidance about the session 4 talks please consult the abstracts listed below.

This release marks the end of the CHI 2011 Brain and Body Designing for Meaningful Interaction workshop videos. I’d like to thank our presentators for allowing us to share their talks on the Internet and for choosing our workshop to present their research. Without you the workshop could not of been the success it was. Hopefully these videos will go some small way to bringing your excellent research to a wider audience, and if not they can always be used to explain what exactly you do to family and friends.

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CHI 2011 Workshop – Session 3 “Evaluating the User Experience” Videos Online

This week see’s the release of the talks presented during the Evaluating the User Experience session. To view these talks and more please click here. For guidance about the session 3 talks please consult the abstracts listed below.

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Technical Difficulties

As some of you may of been aware we migrated the website to a new host today and as expected it didn’t exactly go to plan. When we updated the nameservers for our domain the WordPress database got nuked and so we’ve had to rebuild the site back up. While we’ve restored most of the site (barring the media library which we’ve lost) some parts of the site might still be inoperable as such we’d be grateful if you could let us know when something that was previously working no longer does so in the comments below.