Video games: Starfish, the brain implant project directly connected to the minds of players
Cairo: Mai Kamal El-Din
Gabe Newell, founder of the video game publisher Valve, whose one of the most famous games in the world is called Counter-Strikeand the online game distribution platform, Steam, wishes to take a revolutionary step in the field of technology with a video game invention called Starfish. This technological innovation directly challenges Elon Musk’s brain implants. As a reminder, the director of X (ex-Twitter), Tesla and SpaceX rockets, announced that he had finalized a brain chip called Telepathy. This chip would be intended to treat neurological diseases. For his part, Gabe Newell targets a completely different audience: video game enthusiasts.
Still in project form, Starfish will look like an augmented reality headset that will sit on the head. The implant, the size of a fingernail, will brush against the skull. Its mission will be to accentuate emotions: more fear, joy, stress. For this project, Newell is collaborating with Alan Yates, a former Valve hardware engineer, and a group of scientists, including neuroengineers and a physicist. Starfish, which is also the name of Newell’s company, develops one-dimensional implants. They are “minimally invasive” and must allow “neuromodulation”, neuronal recording and transcranial magnetic stimulation. Newell promises that its chip will transform the experience in video games, with unprecedented levels of immersion, opening new horizons of perception and interaction.
Newell’s interest in this area is not new. He had already mentioned the idea of a brain-computer interface for video games in 2021 with a headset called OpenBCI. At the time, he wanted to allow developers to understand the signals coming from the brains of “gamers”, the players. Getting inside people’s minds is an obsession for web billionaires like Newell, Musk and META/Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Some, like Elon Musk and his company Neuralink, indicate that they want to help the paralyzed to walk, to restore sight to the blind, Newell, to immerse the players in another world. Only Facebook abandoned the idea of implants a few months ago, preferring to focus on connected watches.
However, as scientists from the University of Pennsylvania pointed out, invasive procedures, particularly once implanted in the skull, are irreversible. Not to mention bioethical and security issues such as chip updates and their lifespan.
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