No controllers, no keyboard, no mouse.
Perrikaryal is a gamer, certainly, but she doesn't play exactly like the others.
She lowers her head to move forward, swings it back to move backward, and performs actions... through thought.
During her streams, we can see the British streamer, a psychology graduate, with her head covered in electrodes.
They are used for something essential for his experiment: an electroencephalogram.
To play through thought, “Perri” trains software to identify and interpret the electrical activity of his brain.
Imagining herself pushing a rock will give a different signal than thinking of a plate spinning.
The tool she uses interprets and associates these different signals with keys, which are themselves linked to actions within the game.
To push things even further, it couples this mechanism with “eye-tracking”, a technology which connects the mouse cursor to the place where its gaze falls, and with gyroscopy, which allows it to use his head like a joystick, to make his characters move.
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She then becomes able to play (almost) normally, games of different genres: Elden Ring, Super Smash Bros, Valorant, Fortnite, Halo, Trackamnia.
But what remains, after the impressive side of this tool?
We went to ask her the question live, on her stream, as she was getting ready to put on her device for another session of “mind-controlled gaming”.
“What is the main objective?
All that has changed a lot, she answers us.
At first it was pure curiosity.
I think by saying that, I'm just describing the science, but it's just saying "is it possible to do that?"
» then, if it is, then you have to do it.
But I think that now the goal is to see how far we can go, to see where we can go.
E-sport competitions, for example, events and of course, the main objective is accessibility.
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Being able to play a video game without the hassle of physically manipulating controllers and other peripherals could be an interesting solution for people unable to use such tools.
But for now, Perri isn't sure her device can be useful for that purpose at this time.
“It’s really difficult to use,” Perri moderates.
It's not necessarily a suitable solution, but I hope that one day it will be.
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