Valve CEO Gabe Newell recently gave an interview with IGN where he talked about why his company decided to make Half-Life: Alyx a VR game. What was more interesting in the interview was his thoughts on computer-brain interface technology and how Valve can change the industry. You can watch the entire interview below, courtesy of IGN.
"We're way closer to The Matrix than people realize," Newell said in the video. "It's not going to be The Matrix—The Matrix is a movie and it misses all the interesting technical subtleties and just how weird the post-brain-computer interface world is going to be. But it's going to have a huge impact on the kinds of experiences we can create for people."
Newell thinks that this kind of tech could be revolutionary in the industry. He believes that sending someone a sensation of cold could be difficult, whereas, sending someone visual and motor queues is quite possible.
"It turns out that your brain has really good interfaces for some things and really badly designed, kludge-y interfaces for doing other things," Newell said. "And the fact that your immune systems gets involved in your perceptions of temperature means there are all sorts of weird parts of your brain that participate in the sensation of being cold, whereas things like your motor cortex or your visual cortex are much more tractable problems. And that's what I mean. We're going to learn a lot as we proceed as to what things work and what things don't, what things are valuable to people and what things are party tricks that don't really matter in the long run."
Newell also talked about how this new tech can affect the gaming industry. He said that this kind of tech can be an “extinction-level event” for many companies that are not preparing for it. "If you're in the entertainment business and you're not thinking about this, you're going to be thinking about it a lot more in the future." he said.
So what do you think? Will you be interested in this kind of tech? Do you think that it can replace Virtual Reality? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
