If advertisers thought that hiring mediums and psychics to figure out what people thought of their ads worked, they would probably do it. It's not surprising that more scientific methods have caught on. While consumer reaction can be gauged through the usual focus groups and surveys, some companies also employ new technologies, like those that test heart rate or track eye movements.
Now, however, there's a company that offers far more empirical data on people's emotional responses to things like games and ads. That company, EmSense, is already helping to make games better by using a technology that gives them tons of bio-feedback on just what players are thinking. It could potentially change the way products are evaluated forever.
We talked with Hans Lee, CTO of EmSense, and discussed the ins and outs of his company's new emotion reading technology.
MIT Startup
EmSense was a start up founded by MIT grads, all of whom had worked on different projects that used technology to sense various emotional responses. At first, the company looked at how its technology could be used to reflect player emotions in MMO avatars to better communicate with other players. While this technology has serious potential for the future, eventually EmSense decided to use this feedback to improve game testing rather than trying to replace a web-cam and keyboard.
"[When we showed off the technology,] we were asked, 'What if you could measure the game while it was being made? What if you can help us make the game better?' We finally listened to that and saw that [our technology] was something that the industry needed," said Lee.
"We have a headset, and if you think of all the various sensors they use in a hospital, it's like that," he described. "However, we do this without lots of wires or gel, and it detects everything. Creators want to know several things about the player, like what you like in the game, if you're pumped up and how you're engaged. So we rate what areas of a game create this response. Because we have this headset and that is mass producible, we can test five days a week. So we have thousands of hours to work with and we can benchmark every event, and ask things like, 'How engaging were tanks in Halo?'
"Basically we give them…the ability to know how their audience will respond [to a game] before it hits the market. So we give them the objective measurement for how they're close to reaching their audience. We really have added a large value for the game, and it gives [the developers] the ability to take more creative risks. They can ask, 'What do we want to create?' and they can go on feedback not just from a subjective, feeling perspective."
No wires or gel needed
The application certainly sounds intriguing, but how exactly does it work? The aforementioned headset, which apparently doesn't get in the way (an important factor when trying to rate responses for something as active and participatory as games), measures things like how players furrow their brow, blush, sweat and more—gaining a fairly complete picture of a player's reactions.
"What are the reasons for how people feel? [If they're playing a game,] let's say their heart rate changed, but that isn't enough by itself, so let's add their breathing, body movement and their brainwaves to see how they are responding to their environment. [Our headset] is non-obtrusive, it's just glasses, and it creates a huge amount of data that reflects how you are responding."
"One of the greatest things about a video game is that it can get you engaged. For great games, they create the same response in everyone. We can take all of people's responses, and use thousands of people as a benchmark, and say what's normal and better than average and give [that knowledge] back to developers. Because we have the second-by-second information, we can draw a curve of the ups and down in the experience. We can help determine the point where the level will climax.