Learning Games/Neuro Gaming Technology

  The Immersive Education Initiative has announced that the 2015 venue for the Immersive Education Summit as Paris. With the past 9 years of successful Immersive Education conferences, Immersive Education will continue on holding a summit that addresses the personal and cultural impact of immersive technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, holography, holograms, wearable computing devices, cybernetics, affective computing, neuro-gaming technology and many other forms of immersive experiences. More information on the Immersive Education summit can be access through the following link: (http://immersiveeducation.org/news/2015/02/09/paris-announced-site-immersion-2015).

In this report, I intend to introduce a form of immersion categorized as the "learning games," and the neuro gaming technology.

  Gaming as a hobby can evoke negative images such as lethargic teenagers huddling over their controllers or computers, submerging themselves in their sofas surrounded by snacks. However, the buzz around the gaming industry recently is the idea that the future of gaming might be in everyone's brains. The so called "neuro-gaming" is imminent in our lives, which will change the negative connotations of gaming into riding into the wave of exponential technologies that convert the data gained from our brains into representational data on a gaming platform.

 

Xbox Kinect and Nintendo Wii are recently developed platforms that do not require motor skills to use complicated controllers, so it has a sense of universal appeal, which means that even old people and children can manipulate them. Game designers introduce psycho-emotional data inputs that measure anything of biological or neurological significance from heart rate, facial analysis and the psychology behind it, voice measurement, skin conductance, pupil tracking, pupil dilation, brain activity and many more clues that are given by our body to the hardware to detect them and eventually for the software to decode them. These clues are offered by the gamers subconsciously, and this subconscious events result in the changing paradigm of the respective games that are out in the market.

  The future of neurogaming heavily depends on the simultaneous development of the strong and reliable augmented and virtual reality technology. In this neuro-gaming technology industry, VR and AR confluence to create more enhanced neuro gaming experiences for the users. Because experiencing a game as a first person observer status is relatively more mind-bending and psychedelic experience, there are almost infinite room for this new neurogaming industry to expand its influence and share in the gaming market.

 

  One specific neuro game or learning game that I wish to note is a game called "Minecraft." Minecraft is an video game that incorporates creative and building aspects; by doing so, players are allowed to build constructions out of cubes in a 3D generated world. During our last class, we have covered a news article that Immersive Education is supporting to create a virtual trading post in Colorado, using CAD and Minecraft.

 

  In this newly booming gaming industry, we find out that immersive learning forms and techniques are in the end merged to develop altogether. We here now see a growing trend of collaboration among these fields of different forms of immersion, especially in the neurogaming industry. Because gaming is a very complicated product that incorporates many other technology, it might be a good idea to consider the growth of this industry as a barometer of how the immersive learning and environment in general is developing.

 

This is an assignment from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Collaborative Computing. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc