Romain Rouillard / Photo credit: ALINE MORCILLO / HANS LUCAS / HANS LUCAS VIA AFP 5:33 p.m., February 5, 2024

A British streamer has managed to develop a system that allows her to play video games with her mind. A device that relies on the signal emitted by brain activity, directly associated with an action in the game.

Switching weapons or driving a car in a video game just by thinking about it. For British streamer Perrikaryal, this fantasy straight out of a science fiction film is already a reality. The young woman thus manages to play several mainstream games - Trackmania, Super Smash Bros or even Minecraft - without a keyboard, mouse or controller. 

A feat made possible by a device developed by him. Perrikaryal uses a helmet on which different electrodes are housed which act like an electroencephalogram. Linked to software, this system allows him to convert the electrical activity of his brain into a signal. A signal which will itself be associated with an action in the game: running, jumping, shooting, braking, etc.

Brave enough to give mind control gaming a try? ️ @perrikaryal is a modern-day genius with the ability to control games...with her mind. She has mastered the art of doing this with games like Elden Ring, Halo and TrackMania.#Games#Twitch#Brainpic.twitter.com/RnP6g719wW

— Great Big Story (@greatbigstory) November 9, 2023

Eye tracking 

To control a character's actions, Perrikaryal must focus on a precise image, which will not necessarily correspond to what she wishes to do in the game, but which will trigger the signal associated with the desired gesture. “For example, the simple fact of imagining that something is coming towards you can provoke an attack from the character in the game,” specifies the person concerned in a video published on the Great Big Story channel. "I think in total it must have taken 600 hours of repeating instructions for the software to remember them. And then you have to think the same thing, in the same way every time. If you deviate just a little bit, it doesn’t work,” she adds. 

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A feat which is accompanied by another remarkable technology: “eye-tracking” or “eye tracking”. In this way, the young woman manages to place the cursor where she wants, simply by looking at the desired location. And thanks to gyroscopy, she can also move characters by moving her head, without using a joystick. The height of his performance was that Perrikaryal even won a game in the game Valorant last September, against an opponent who played in a much more traditional way, with keyboard and mouse. 

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A solution for certain players with disabilities?

“All of this took me about six months to get it working. I’ve been on the project for ten months now and it’s still not perfect,” she smiles to Great Big Story. The designer even admits not having believed in the success of her device. “I said to myself ‘this is not possible, it must be a fluke or a mistake’,” she remembers. "I was blown away. I thought, this is such a crazy idea, based on something I've never tried and that, as far as I know, very few people have tried. And it worked. worked! I had to do it several times just to believe it,” she admits with a burst of laughter. 

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Should we see this as a miracle solution to open access to video games to people with amputated arms or hands? Not as it stands, admits the streamer. “The model is really difficult to use. It’s not necessarily a suitable solution, but I hope that one day it will be the case,” she told Le

Parisien

.