Vitality sensor is nothing like motion control

[theprof00]

hsrob said:

theprof00 said:
I've seen some of the videos for ED, and what's jumping out at me is that the game changes based on what your character experiences. In that scenario, it's awesome, because you have full control over it, well, to some extent.
Basing it off of pulse rate would be difficult for gamers to control. To talk about the erratic heart rates I mentioned earlier, it's not a joke. It cannot be simply "baselined" and differentiated because of several key ideas which all spawn from the inherent fact that it must record beats per MINUTE.

"Why", you might ask? Check your pulse for a full minute. Pulse changes erratically based on things like air quality, breathing speed, sitting position, and more. What about smokers or people drinking caffeine? The game will change simply because you had a soda, or even based on the time of day. Even while in the same position, the heart does not beat at a steady pace, it jumps, and does other things because of biological processes. Then on top of that, you are goig to be waving a wiimote around, further affecting your heart rate. It just doesn't seem very plausible.
I do think there will be some games for it, and I can now think of some that might use it, but as far as fun factor, I don't see it changing much.

To address the first point about ED, well no you don't really have control over it until such point as you a very good at the game, can easily kill all your enemies and never lose sanity.  Alternatively you can use magik to restore your sanity but you can't easily do that if you are surrounded by enemies.

(skip to the last sentence if you want the short version)

Secondily a few misconceptions.  Pulse is quoted as beats per minute it's not recorded as such.  Have you ever seen a doctor take someone's pulse for a full minute?  Typically it's recorded over 5-10 seconds and then you do the necessary multiplication in your head. A pulse oximeter works the same way, it records your heart rate for several seconds and then calculates the bpm from that.  It would be impossible and very impracticle for the machine to count beats for a full minute before updating the stats. The vitality sensor likely can update your heart rate every few seconds.

Finally heart rate is not nearly so erratic as you seem to think.  This is a slight simplification but basically in  a person without heart disease you can have a regular pulse or a regularly irregular pulse and that's it.  The latter is a regular varition of the pulse in some people associated with breathing  and is repeating and predictable.  All other variations are just increases or decreases in rate, if someone suddenly develops an irregular rate then there is something wrong with their heart. The machine could reasonably test a baseline heart rate for you before each session of the game based on a few seconds recording in a sitting position  and as long as you hadn't done anything like running up three flights of stairs before playing the game it would be ok.   Now any other factors like time of day, position (unless you go from lying to standing while playing), caffeine etc might have a slight effect on your resting rate but your heart is still going to react as it normally would in terms of increasing or decreasing rate in reponse to stimuli or need. Now sure something like drinking a few strong coffees while playing the game could potentially mess up the readings but if you have your Wii-mote strapped to one hand and the Vitality sensor to the other it's going to be really hard to pick up a coffee cup anyway so i don't think it's going to be a problem ;)

I still question myself how well this can all be integrated into gameplay but measuring a baseline heart rate at the start of each gaming session and measuring changes from that at short intervals is not that difficult.

Yes, I actually forgot to mention that recordings only happened for 5-10 seconds, which was the point of everything.

If your pulse double jumps once in 5-10 seconds, which it does a lot, your pulse rate will be calculated as having jumped 6-12 bpm. If you bring your feat up to your chest it will do the same, possibly more. While taking a pulse at the doctor doesn't require 100% accurate pulse rate because there is a range of health spanning nearly 60 beats per minute, having incremental adjustments in a game is going to be necessary. Of course they could just up the range between pulse rates, but then, how much is it going to take to see any differences.

Plus, you don't hold the sensor, it clips to your finger.