Skip to main content

New VR horror game gets scarier if your heart rate isn’t fast enough

Bring To Light Trailer

A bit like spicy food, the effectiveness of horror titles varies from person to person. What makes me break out in a sweat may not be enough to elevate your heart rate. Fortunately (or, if you’re of a nervous disposition, perhaps, unfortunately,) the good folks at game developer Red Meat Games have come up with a neat way around this problem. It includes medical technology that would more commonly be used for helping people than scaring the bejesus out of them.

In its latest virtual reality game Bring to Light, players have the option of strapping on a heart rate monitor to personalize the game’s fear factor. Get too comfortable with the experience, and the game’s artificial intelligence will know to ramp up the terror. Because who wants a relaxing, enjoyable game experience, right?

“Back in 2013, gaming conferences were plastered with mobile game ad companies selling their ad services,” Red Meat Games CEO Keith Makse told Digital Trends. “I had the thought at the time that rather than automating the ad systems, as was proffered by every ad company, there could be a tool that could automate game design in some way.”

Red Meat’s first attempt at doing this resulted in a tool Makse calls DAISy (Distributed A.I. System), which tweaked a trivia game based on real-time user interaction. However, Makse wanted to go further than this and utilize biometric technology. “When I was brainstorming another game, I thought we should be able to use biometric feedback as user input, and we quickly thought of using a heartbeat,” he continued. “That was the easy part. We’ve probably spent about 12 months in total designing, building, and testing this system to get it to where it is today.”

Bring to Light puts players in control of the sole survivor of a subway accident, which turns out to be just the first step in a terrifying Lovecraftian horror experience. The $20 game launched on Steam earlier this month, available for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, as well as a “flat” version you can play on PC without the need for a virtual reality headset.

“While I still think it’s too early to tell if this will be picked up by any others out there, I do think that using biometric feedback will eventually become an option for games and other apps out there,” Makse said. “More biometric devices are released every day and constant improvements are being made.”

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
HP’s Reverb G2 Omnicept Edition is a VR headset that knows when your pulse is up
hp introduces reverb g2 omnicept edition

HP is launching a new commercial virtual reality headset, the Reverb G2 Omnicept Edition. The headset is part of the new "HP Omnicept Solution" and is packed full of new sensors for developers and businesses to leverage and create experiences for training, wellbeing, creation, and collaboration.

Coming in spring 2021 for developer and enterprise users, the new headset's design and internals are quite similar to the original HP Reverb G2, which was called the world’s highest-resolution VR headset.

Read more
Iconic music venue will present live gigs you can watch in VR from your home
Brixton Academy 1

It sounds like ancient history here in the middle of 2020, but there was once a magical time, before social distancing, when large crowds of people would gather together in giant venues to listen to live music. With coronavirus still very much a thing, it could be a long time before this once again becomes a normal occurrence -- which is why the U.K.’s O2 Academy Brixton, one of London’s most iconic music venues, is gearing up to host a series of 360-degree virtual reality gigs.

The brainchild of promotion company Live Nation and MelodyVR, the “Live From O2 Academy Brixton” events will give fans with the MelodyVR app and an Oculus VR headset the opportunity to be virtually transported to the legendary London music venue (thereby taking care of the whole “can’t travel” problem) for live performances from a number of bands and individual musical artists.

Read more
Veteran game designer Tom Hall joins VR firm Resolution Games
arizona state vr headset 180822 bio lab 7

Back in 1992, when most of the world was playing Street Fighter II or Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Tom Hall was exploring the world of virtual reality.

The game designer, who’s best known for his work on the original Doom and Commander Keen, was leading a team at id Software that assembled a VR version of Wolfenstein 3D. It was, according to Hall, “fuzzy, but fun,” and it was enough to spark an interest in the field that has spanned almost 30 years.

Read more