Hey everybody, we found something we bet you’ll like. It’s a game. Everybody you know is playing it. It’s a lot of fun. It’s the Microsoft HoloLens version of the game from Star Trek: The Next Generation season five episode six, and it works using your emotional state to gently glide little disks into weird wiggly cones.
Play for a little while. The game goes as far as you can take it…
Okay, the Microsoft HoloLens version of the game from Star Trek: TNG, which was posted to Reddit by user litewo, isn’t exactly like the fictional version, but it is frighteningly, frighteningly close. It was created by Robert Burke, who graduated from MIT with a focus on “the design of a scalable, extensible architecture for the brains of synthetic creatures,” and it utilizes a Pip galvanic biosensor to measure players’ levels of relaxation. It does this by measuring the electrical resistance of the skin, or basically how sweaty one is, to determine stress levels. The lower your levels of stress, the more likely a disk is to go into a wiggly cone.
Burke notes in his cursory walkthrough of the making of the HoloLens version of the game that “Star Trek has a history of envisioning technologies that eventually become real. Often faster and more addictive than anyone expects!”
The one big difference between the fictional version of the game and Burke’s HoloLens version is the fact that there’s no super intense pleasure reward that makes you feel like Riker on shore leave on Risa… which probably makes this version of the game a lot safer to play, and less likely to take over rational thought.
That said, these two videos of the game were posted a year ago to Burke’s channel, and the clearly productive engineer (who also swims with sharks) hasn’t posted any videos since. It’s almost as if he became really engrossed in something that’s kept him from putting up more videos. Something a bit more rewarding. Like playing the trombone!
What do you think about this HoloLens version of the game? Do you think we’ll be able to shoot pleasure chemicals directly into people’s brains even better than social media can sometime in the near future? Let us know in the comments below!
Images: Robert Burke
More on Star Trek!
- Anthony Rapp talks making history on Star Trek: Discovery
- Here are seven things Star Trek Discovery needs to do in season two
- Check out this awesome new Khan figure
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