The NeuroGaming Conference and Expo drew more than 300 people to the YetiZen Innovation Lab this week in San Francisco. That’s a good turnout for a first-time conference, and it generated enough buzz to inflate a new investment bubble in games. There was plenty to get excited about with games that can really latch onto our nervous systems and brains. More than 50 companies showed up to share their efforts in the space. But it’s also clear that the nascent market is also in need of a reality check.

Source: Dean Takahashi

Roger Quy, Nate Hennings, and Sana Choudary

Zack Lynch (pictured above), the organizer of this week’s event and founder of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, deserves enormous credit for envisioning and defining a new part of the game market. He explains Neurogaming as the “technologies that integrate all of our nervous system, not just our brains, into gaming.” It includes technologies that track things like player heart rate, brain wave data, facial analysis, pupil dilation, hand and body gestures, and changing emotional and cognitive state — all toward driving actual gameplay.

Lynch is effectively looking ahead to the point where new technologies put the spinal cord in touch with the brain and result in a fusion of big data games that are fun. Looked at that way, you could see Neurogaming as a combination of a market with lot of early R&D (it’s still pretty hard to use only your brain waves to control a game), as well as a market where a lot of heavy lifting has been done in putting the sensors in place, such as the Wii remote or Microsoft Kinect. Neurogames will take the data from sensors and turn it into fun. In five years, Lynch believes it will be a huge market.

But if someone is going to invest what it takes to make that happen, there has to be a pay off. At the event, I moderated a panel of investors who evaluated the risks and opportunities in the market. We took a survey of the space. On the lightweight level, Neurogaming started with “brain training” games such as Nintendo’s Brain Age from 2005,  and it has evolved into hardcore brain training games from companies like Lumos Labs. And it has expanded to include sensor-based gaming such as Nintendo’s Wii Fit, Microsoft’s Kinect Sports, and Intel’s Perceptual Computing initiative.

Our panelists saw Neurogaming hardware startups as risky ventures, and none have made a real investment in a Neurogaming company yet. I characterized the market as being made up of great science fiction, fascinating R&D, and limited commercial potential. Chris Petrovic, a former general manager of GameStop Digital Ventures, said it was very hard for the retail chain to embrace startups that wanted to sell an accessory for a PC or console since the likelihood that a gamer would buy an extra accessory for a machine was very low.

It’s pretty hard for startups to come up with the marketing dollars to promote a new product in 4,500 game stores in the U.S., Petrovic said. Any startup will have to find partners with deep pockets, and to do that, it will have to have technology that works flawlessly.

Petrovic also said that companies avoid calling themselves “Neurogaming” companies because they might just wind up scaring consumers, who may not want games messing with their brains.

“Keep consumers in mind,” he said. “Don’t call this the next great Neurogaming device because it won’t sell.”

Source: Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi, Brian Cho, and Roger Quy

So a Neurogaming startup trying to sell its own hardware (as only a few companies such as NeuroSky have successfully done) is swimming upstream. Only the biggest players, such as Microsoft, have the investment horizon and capital to build technologies such as Kinect and bring a new piece of hardware to the market with a bang.

But, as the market grows up, it is encouraging to see technologies that could be used for Neurogames being built into general-purpose devices such as smartphones. One of the most exciting platforms for Neurogaming could be Google Glass, given its use of so many big data sources that it can pull into your view, said Brian Cho, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. That technology could prove to be very immersive and entertaining.

“It always increases what’s possible when the devices themselves are more capable,” said Sana Choudary, the chief executive of YetiZen (pictured with the gold crown). “Qualcomm acquired a gesture control company, and it is putting that capability into all of its chip platforms for mobile devices. That’s more exciting for a game developer.”

Choudary said that, based on data from the investment bank Raymond James, about 108 Neurogaming startups have raised money in recent years. Eight companies are providing technologies for game developers to enable Neurogaming. Sixteen startups called themselves platforms, seven were new hardware plays, and eight were integrating hardware devices together. Of all of the companies, only one was a pure game developer. The good news is that the category isn’t oversaturated like social casino games.

Neurogaming companies have raised around $23 million for new hardware plays and $64 million for existing hardware plays. That’s not a bad start, but it’s a small slice of the $901.3 million raised by game companies in 2012. Most new investment in games is going into mobile game companies, where it’s much easier to strike gold than in Neurogaming.

Roger Quy, a partner at venture firm Technology Partners, said he slices the market into two parts. One is the part of Neurogaming that could be therapeutic, such as the software that is used to identify and treat people with attention deficit disorder (ADD). The other part is entertainment. Therapeutic Neurogames have to have measurable benefits, but they often aren’t fun. The entertaining Neurogames are fun, but their benefits are often easily debunked.

Source: Dean Takahashi

Nate Hennings, Sana Choudary, and Chris Petrovic

“Therapeutic benefits have to be measured and pass muster with the FDA,” Quy said.

Quy worries that many technologies are being added to platforms on the assumption that they will be used for something useful. But what games would really benefit from information such as a user’s heartbeat? (Some folks have speculated that you could speed up or slow down a game based on how the user physically responds to it). Quy says that adding technology for the sake of it isn’t necessarily going to result in fun and useful Neurogames.

Quy also identified another weakness in the market: the lack of investors who are comfortable making game investments. Gaming falls “between the cracks” of information technology and healthcare investments, and many investors won’t even listen to game pitches because they can’t judge them well. On the other hand, the smaller game companies are capital efficient, and they don’t always need a ton of seed money.

Gaming is like the Tesla Roadster for Neurogaming applications, said Nate Hennings of Union Square Advisors. It is a market full of enthusiasts who want to believe in the high-end technology and will adopt it even if it is expensive and on the bleeding edge. But as the technology and games become more real, the chance to reach the mass market is growing, and it could spread into other markets well beyond gaming.

Cho said a Neurogaming startup would grab his attention if it had a world class team with people who have done a successful startup before and have a great track record working with technology. It helps to have software or hardware that can’t be easily replicated. All of that mitigates risk.

It could still be years before a Neurogaming company makes its mark. Still, with so many game companies on the downswing, it was fun to talk about a market on its way up. And it’s fun to dream.

“I would love to have one of those brain sensors so that I could blow up my enemies in a game just by thinking it,” Choudary said.

Quy said he would love to see a device with brain wave detection technology built into an inexpensive mobile device.

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Video games have often been a feast for the visual senses, but smell has been left out. At the NeuroGaming Conference and Expo, some visionaries are talking about how to incorporate the sense of smell into games so that entertainment can become even more engaging, immersive, and realistic in the future. They’re trying to create digital devices that can insert smell into games as we play them.

NeuroGaming is a nascent category of the game business, as defined by conference head Zack Lynch, who organized the event at the YetiZen Game Innovation Center this week. Lynch, the founder of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, explains Neurogaming as the “technologies that integrate all of our nervous system, not just our brains, into gaming.” It includes technologies that track things like player heart rate, brain wave data, facial analysis, pupil dilation, hand and body gestures, and changing emotional and cognitive state — all toward driving actual gameplay.

Smell is probably going to be the most difficult sense to include in a game in the future. But given the progress of technology, it really isn’t a crazy idea, said moderator Richard Warp [pictured with microphone], the senior audio lead and NeuroMusic composer at Leapfrog Enterprises.

While 3D visuals have advanced over the past couple of decades, every gamer will acknowledge that adding sound to those visuals makes games much more enthralling. This has made headsets and speakers common. Smell gadgets are not common.

Charlene Coleman, the CEO of Sensory Acumen, said her technology is being considered for treatment of soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. She said that some smells are soothing and relaxing, while others are not. Some soldiers, she said, can’t stand the smell of bacon if they have smelled burning bodies on a battlefield.

Heather Kelley, a game sense designer at PerfectPlum, said that there is no universal reaction to smells. Some smells trigger very different sensations or emotions in different people.

One problem with smell is that it can dissipate if you’re in a windy environment or outdoors in a city, said Bill Wiles, the president and chief executive at Scent Sciences.

“There isn’t really a scent palette like a color palette,” Wiles said. “It really goes into what effect that you want. Some smells are repulsive to one culture and attractive to others. If you had a wake-up smell in a hotel, what would it be? I thought it would be coffee, but other people said bacon. Certain smells people relate to.”

Some gadget that helps deliver a sense of smell might be necessary. Kelley said that is what helps astronauts, who often lose their sense of smell in space because they miss the air currents that deliver the smells to their noses. She said it would be cool to go up to a sculpture, pass your hand over it, and smell the aromas emanating from the sculpture. That would change your experience of the work of art.

You could also insert a fragrance in a car, soothing someone who is about go crazy with road rage, Wiles said.

Sound also isn’t perfected yet in games, but its hurdles aren’t as giant as those facing smell,  said Steve Horowitz, composer and president of The Code International. Adaptive sound efforts are aimed at creating sounds that match the dramatic tension in a game.

“You can design for 5.1 speakers, but most consumers haven’t set up their systems right so they won’t hear what you’ve designed,” Horowitz.

At some point, smell experts will have to create their own new smells. Who knows, for instance, what a zombie smells like? It’s probably not good, but burnt bacon probably would freak some gamers out.

At some point, “What you are all leading up to what we all want, which is total immersion,” said Wiles. And Coleman said that smell would definitely be part of any Star Trek Holodeck or complete simulated reality experience from science fiction.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Neurogaming is set to disrupt the gaming industry and transform the gaming experience over the next five years. It will ride a wave of inexpensive sensors, ridiculous processing power, fast bandwidth and amazing design talent. Prepare for whole new landscapes of fun and fear.

In the famous words of William Gibson, author of the epic Neuromancer saga, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Similarly, many of the technologies that make neurogaming possible are here, they just aren’t tied together yet. There are growing indications that 2013 will be the year neurogaming technologies will begin to coalesce, creating the bedrock on which the sector will flourish for years to come.

What is NeuroGaming?

Neurogaming integrates a broad array of inputs, including player heart rate, brain waves, pupil dilation, hand and body gestures, and changing emotional state to drive rich game play.  Neurogame developers use increasingly sophisticated sensory, emotional, cognitive and behavioral technologies to create deeply adaptive and radically compelling gaming experiences.  There is real science and the best technology ever produced behind these new capabilities to tie one’s nervous system directly into games.

Neurogaming is ideally suited to take advantage of output technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality and haptic sensation systems to make entirely new gaming experiences possible. Neurogaming allows game designers to better understand and control the experience of their players, and therefore create games that push the boundaries of reality in ways that haven’t been seen before.

Brave New Inputs

Gaming has always been severely limited by controller input, resulting in basic move, jump, hit and shoot games.  This limited vocabulary of inputs drove limited game play. It’s only been with the advent of motion and gesture control that we’ve begun to break new ground.

Driving the future of full body motion control are the familiar faces of Nintendo’s Wii, Sony’s Move, Microsoft’s Kinect. Expanding the boundaries of multi-dimensional control even further is Sixense with it’s 6-axis controller called Razer Hydra which has been integrated in the games like Portal 2 to allow users to easily drag, move and rotate objects in space.

As sensor costs plummet, expect to see motion sensors from companies like Leap Motion multiply in the gaming environment as they capture ever finer gradations of movement, from your fingertips to your facial expressions, all focused on improving game play accuracy and expanding the potential experience space.

But this is only the start. Already, companies like Neurosky and Emotiv have pioneered brain-based controllers using EEG (electroencephalogram) neurosensing technology, making it possible to drive specific actions just by thinking or changing one’s facial expressions. For example, players can smash boulders by concentrating or scare away demons with angry facial expressions. And while this technology is still in its infancy more players like InteraXon are entering the space as designers as diverse as Mattel, Canada’s Personal Neuro Devices, and Japan’s NeoComimi begin to incorporate brain wave data with other social, local and mobile advances to create profoundly novel experiences.

Voice will play an important role in the neurogaming experience.  Whether it’s basic voice communication among real players using Xfire’s voice chat channel or direct voice control as with BioWare’s Mass Effect 3, it’s clear that voice and vocal communication has an important part to play in our multi-sensory gaming future. For example, sensors that pick up on changes in your voice tone and pitch as you give commands, might drive your squad to react differently depending on how the command is given.

Another exciting area of development is emotional neurogaming technologies. While one-third of gamers say that emotions are already quite important to the gaming experience, future expectations are even higher with over two-thirds of all gamers expecting games would equal or surpass the emotional impact of books, movies and music in the coming years, according to a study conducted by Bowen Research.

Companies are using a variety of techniques such as analyzing facial expressions, changes in skin conductance level, and eye-tracking to understand emotional reactions within the game design process. Imagine going beyond click tracking to measure attention and engagement at a far deeper level. Keep an eye on SMI Vision, iMotions, and Affectiva with their Affdex and QSensor technologies. Major game producers like Valve and Activision Blizzard are already using emotional modeling tools like these, and it’s only a matter of time before these technologies move out of research labs and into the real gaming world as drivers of actual game play.

Innovation often comes from small companies. Small developers like Thatgamecompany, GameFace.Me, and Bagooba are already heavily focused incorporating a variety of emotions into the gaming experience. Think of the new emotional control system possibilities going forward; imagine you’re stalking your prey in a squad, you react to the fear or anger of those around you, which changes the effectiveness of your squad in combat – it’s just like real life.

Want to play better and smarter? Then keep an eye on the cognitive neurogaming space. Who needs auto-aiming when you could use direct neurostimulation? UK’s Foc.us is looking to boost playing performance by using sniper technology developed by the US Army. Their gorgeous and easy to use transcranial direct current stimulation device literally zaps your head with a miniscule electric pulse (which you can’t feel) during training to help make your brain more susceptible to learning. Applied to gaming, it will create an arms race among players looking for competitive advantage. This is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow taken to new heights!

Other cognitive gaming companies are gaining momentum too. Recent findings in neuroscience are driving Lumos Labs’ gamified web software to boost individual memory performance while Advanced Brain Monitoring is developing accelerated learning systems for use in a variety of environments.

In addition, companies like Intific are opening their cognitive modeling software for broader user by the gaming community while other startups like Neurotrek are developing even more robust ways to improve game players attention via ultrasonic stimulation. While it’s far from clear how the cognitive technologies will play themselves out, it’s hard to imagine a future where they aren’t adopted en masse, as they begin to prove their worth.

Along with new sensory, emotional and cognitive inputs, there are also companies focused on using behavioral analysis to make better games. Today, lots of gaming analytics companies are focused on this area.  Taking the big data approach in game design are companies like Zynga. On the other side of the behavioral technology spectrum are companies like Riot Games, who have in-house behavioral psychologists developing models to track player behavior that suggest ways to reduce trolling behavior in games like League of Legends.

Imagineering New Vistas

While mobile screens and flat screens dominate our visual senses today, it won’t be much longer before our eyes get hit with full new flavors of visual amazement as augmented reality and virtual reality output technologies finally hit the mainstream.

Google’s Project Glass already has game designers chomping at the augmented reality bit. Project Glass is a head mounted display that highlights information in a hands-free way driven by sense and voice commands. While still in early development it holds very interesting promise for the gaming community.

Virtual reality is becoming real too. Hot products like OculusVR’s immersive 110 degree, ultra low latency head tracking headset as well as Atlantis Cyberspace’s battle hardened virtual reality platform are here now. Looking a bit further, the convergence of augmented and virtual reality into mixed real world immersive gaming will leave us all wondering: “Is it real, or is it Memorex?”

Haptics has deep roots in industry and gaming. New work by Disney Research is being used to give players direct sensation feedback through haptics gloves and seats. The Vybe Haptic Gaming Pad designed for Marvel Avengers gives your whole backside the feeling of movement such as when turning a tight corner or falling down a hill. Other possibilities are easy to imagine.

Designing the Future Disruption

We are still just scratching the surface of neurogaming, but it’s obvious from conversations with leading game design thinkers from shops like Playmatics, LudusLab, SailByte, ShuffleBrain, XEODesign, and Engine Co. 4 that there is broad interest in accelerating the neurogame design discussion. Thought leaders are working to understand, visualize, show, and tune the interactions of an ever-increasing number of tools and systems.

While neurogaming technologies are exciting, it will take time for designers to learn to use them well. New techniques embedded in social games and gamification started out shallow and manipulative, but eventually improved. Neurogaming is potentially more powerful, which is all the more reason to get the discussion started now, to speed up the development cycles and give the player community the best as soon as possible.

Neurogaming platforms create whole new opportunities for engaging the mind and body. New mechanics will be possible with the convergence of sensory, emotional, cognitive and behavioral technologies. We look for innovation from the established and indie game developer communities to drive use and acceptance. One thing’s for sure, storytelling in a neurogaming environment could be amazingly horizontal and substantially enriched.

The game industry is at the forefront of neurogaming revolution and its impact will be enormous. In addition to creating new avenues of growth in gaming, the industry will also create positive spin off effects in other economic sectors such as healthcare, education, and national defense. Already companies in health space like LimbsAlive, Akili Interactive, Posit Science, Brain Resource, Blue Marble Gaming Company and others are creating viable therapeutic neurogames. Advances in these other sectors will in turn influence the entertainment neurogame developer community, creating positive returns for everyone involved.

There has never been a more exciting to be in the gaming industry, especially as the future continues to race toward us. As technology accelerates we are at a strategic inflection pointing toward the development of the ultimate in game experiences. Neurogaming represents a broad new segment of the game industry that will drive growth by engaging the minds of million of players in fundamentally new and exciting ways.

We are at the dawn of the neurogaming age, on the cusp of making the impossible possible. To help spark the revolution we’ve organized the first ever NeuroGaming Conference and Expo in San Francisco at the YetiZen Game Innovation Center, May 1-2, 2013. GamesBeat’s lead writer Dean Takahashi will moderate a session. Come join us. We’ve brought together over 40 CEOs from across the neurogaming space to share their insights and show you their cutting edge technologies. And for the game hackers out there, we’ll also be hosting a neurogaming hackfest the weekend prior to the conference to get your creative juices flowing. Let the neurogames begin!

Zack Lynch is the founder of the NeuroGaming Conference and Expo and is the author of the book, The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science is Changing Our World.  He is also the founder of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, and co-founder of NeuroInsights and HealthRally. You can follow him @neurorev.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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