
GALVANIC SKIN RESPONSE GRAPH TRIAL
Sensors like this have been in use for over a year in trial studies that aim to create a measurement of psychological pain in patients where diagnosis can be difficult. Whether this is used to measure stress in sufferers of epilepsy or not, she tells us, the fight or flight response remains the same.
GALVANIC SKIN RESPONSE GRAPH SKIN
These "skin conductance" sensors will send out a small electrical pulse to an area of the skin and measure the strength of this signal compared to another area of skin in order to test the conductivity. The rise in moisture causes skin to become more electrically conductive. When a person experiences stress, moisture collects under their skin as part of a response from their nervous system. This electrodermal tech was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab under a simple premise, a representative at MIT Media Lab project's Affectiva tells us. If the test results suggest that something doesn't work in the way we expected or wanted, we revisit it, re-design it, change it and test it again, and we repeat this process until we get the results that we want." By analysing the results from hundreds of candidates we can determine how well we've achieved that for the majority of people. As a subject plays the game this scientific equipment plots the response levels on a graph so that we can see, in real-time, whether the techniques we've used to drive emotional responses such as fear and fright have worked. It's not something that a person can directly control, so we can trust the results as ‘honest'. "Galvanic Skin Response Testing, picks up the immediate change in moisture content of the skin at times of heightened emotion. For testing fear and fright, we use what we refer to as the ‘fear machine', which has the player wired to a device that detects skin response. We set up these test environments slightly differently in order to test specific aspects of the game. "Testing our work throughout development on hundreds people that have an interest in the type of game we're making and then analysing their first-time-experience is an essential part of the development process. "It's not a new problem for developers though," Samuels said. Alongside these changes, the studio is now focusing on using new technology to test what fear looks like in modern gamers. While the studio first planned to pair the game with the PlayStation Move controller, major steps have since been made to take the horror homage to the new-gen PlayStation 4 instead. Until Dawn, originally announced in 2012 for PlayStation 3, has since experienced enormous changes during development. "We can only really tell whether we're achieving what we set out to achieve when we put it in the hands of players for their first time," Supermassive Games' managing director Pete Samuels tells us. Throughout the development of Until Dawn, the studio's first step into the horror genre, the game developer is using electrodermal sensors to test the effectiveness of its scares. But what if you could ensure your video game would feature genuine scares?Īs part of a preliminary push toward finding an answer to this question, British game studio Supermassive Games is experimenting with technology originally used to measure stress levels in children with epilepsy. From the lackluster scares of Resident Evil 5 to looping dread of P.T., fluctuations in the quality of horror games have made the genre a notoriously unreliable venture.
