In an interview with IGN, Valve CEO Gabe Newell reflects on the company's history and his motivation for making Half-Life a VR game: he discussed his motivation for making Alyx a VR game. It's worth watching the whole piece, as Newell rarely gives interviews, but I was most interested in his positive comments about the computer-brain interface.

"The area that I spend a lot of time in has evolved from a lot of research on the brain-computer interface that happened a while ago," he said. So when my attention is not on other things, I am drawn back to those background threads." [The human brain can already communicate directly with computers, albeit to a very limited extent compared to science fiction systems like The Matrix or William Gibson's Neuromancer, which can completely replace physical reality with a simulated virtual one. can do so. However, Newell believes that such science fiction technology is not as far off as it may seem.

"We are much closer to 'The Matrix' than people think. The Matrix is a movie, and it misses some interesting technological subtleties and how strange a post-brain computer interface world could be. But it will have a huge impact on the kinds of experiences we can create for people."

When it comes to actually designing this technology, Newell says that recognizing the nature of the problems ahead is like "trying to explain the Internet to someone who has never used it. But as one example, he believes that sending information to someone's visual or motor cortex would be much easier than making someone feel cold. [It turns out that] your brain has a really good interface for some things and a really badly designed, fiddly interface for other things," he said. 'And the fact that the immune system is involved in the perception of temperature means that there's a weird part of your brain that's involved in feeling cold. So that's what I mean. We're going to learn a lot about what works and what doesn't, what things are valuable to people and what things are party tricks that don't matter so much in the long run."

As for how such technology will affect gaming, "I think it's an extinction-level event for forms of entertainment that don't think about this stuff.

"If you're in the entertainment business and you're not thinking about this, then you're going to be thinking about it more in the future, because it's going to have an impact on the way we do business.

What Newell did not say much about was the depth of his own research on the topic, how it affects Valve as a company, and what products he plans to create next. However, given that brain-computer interfaces are a developing area of research, I do not expect Steam Brain to be announced anytime soon.