Eliminating the possibility of getting mad enough to through their controller at a wall during a gaming session, this new headset could keep players calm.
In a list including: the game itself being a pile of buggy rubbish, enemies thwarting your attempt at ousting them and sending your player the a checkpoint halfway across the map, difficulty settings are some of the most prevalent annoyances when gaming offline. Rarely bothering you from the start, once a game gets a few hours in and the ante ramps up, being unable to beat a level can be a nuisance when you’re looking for pure and relatively unhindered gaming fun in your favourite first person shooter. The Immersion headset might be a valuable asset to those offline shouty types then, as one of its boasted features is that can apparently curb gamer rage.
Rather than just being a purposefully headline grabbing feature that works by playing the swooning melody of a classical, Mozart piece into your ears, the science behind the Immersion headset is actually rather fancy. Designer Samuel Matson actually engineered Immersion from a hack of an Xbox controller (images suggest this is Xbox 360 only, sorry Xbox One fans!), which allows the headset to track the heart0rate of a player, adjusting the difficulty level of the game if it recognises data that suggests that the wearer is beginning to get a little angry.
While difficulty is easy enough to change in the single player element of a game, there’s no word on whether or not Immersion would be able to work with online modes somehow, given that publisher and develop servers use relatively unalterable data (e.g which level you are and how many multiplayer kills you’ve achieved) to match-make you with a group of similarly skilled players. However, the Immersion headset is currently just a prototype for now, with no retail or pricing plans currently announced, so there is a chance that the headset could be improved before (and if) it makes it to market.
We’ll keep you posted once we know more.
Source: Immersion
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