Second Life Future Salon: InnerLife :: Proposed Biofeedback Interface for Second Life

I just came across the InnerLife project dedicated to introducing biofeedback into Second Life. Project leader Elizabeth Dalton (Nekokami Dragonfly in SL) caught the biofeedback bug from The Journey to Wild Divine, an "inner-active" computer game controlled by the variance of your heart rate and skin conductance.

Elizabeth explains why she started Inner Life:

"I enjoyed the Journey to Wild Divine so much, I started to be desperate for the sequel, but that seemed to be a long time out in the future. I also started to have ideas of my own about activities that could be included in a simlar game, and I could see from participating in the discussion boards at the Wild Divine site that many other people also had suggestions. I initially started working on a free-standing "event editor" using Runtime Revolution, that we could all have used to import graphics and music into to create events, but then I discovered Second Life. I became convinced that this would be a great place to develop tools that would allow anyone to create biofeedback events, which we could all share together. I've been trying to recruit people who share this vision ever since."

Interesting... I've tested Wild Divine only very briefly, but most of the reviews^I've^read say it really deserves to be called revolutionary and that the biofeedback interface works great. Actually, the most commonly reported hang-up is with Wild Divine's mystical aesthetic. But bringing the interface into SL would allow designers to strip away the New Agey look and experiment with whatever scenarios they want. It would be great to play the SL version of brainball! And in a massively multi-player setting you could harness entire teams of biofeedbackers for some truly wild experiments.

Elizabeth says she tried to enter InnerLife into the SL Game Developers' Competition but didn't make the cut. That seems a shame as this has to be more innovative than most other entrants (lack of popular feedback devices may have been the barrier), but she says she's determined to move forward anyway. Looks like there are some interesting folks helping her out, including Onyx Everett, an art student in London who's working on an SL Dream Recorder amongst other things. Be in touch with Elizabeth through the InnerLife Project Website if you're interested in where this could lead.

You know, both Second Life and Journey to Wild Divine demoed at Accelerating Change 2004, and I vaguely remember hearing about a woman running around looking for Lindens to ask if SL could hook up to the biofeedback controls. That wasn't you, Elizabeth, was it? :-)

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InnerLife :: Proposed Biofeedback Interface for Second Life

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