Hunter: The Reckoning Preview
Posted by Marcel Klum on 14 March 2002 - 13:08 · 1 comment & 85 views
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Full name: Marcel Klum
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Full name: Marcel Klum
Forum name: Redmak
Contact: via forum PM
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There are four basic characters to choose from in Hunter: The Reckoning (though High Voltage has promised there will be more to unlock in the finished version). The game vocabulary is a bit atypical (zombies are "rots," character classes are "creeds," and spells are "edges"), but each character's classic influences become obvious within moments of choosing them. Every character begins the game with a bladed weapon, a basic firearm with unlimited ammo, and one edge. Additional weapons can be found strewn around the battlefield, in the form of shotguns, machine guns, a chainsaw, and even a flamethrower. Thankfully, you can carry all of these weapons at once, toggling between them with the buttons, so you don't have to make Halo-like choices as to what to leave behind when you find a new toy. Each character will also gain experience points as the game progresses, increasing their stats and learning new edges.
Lead researcher Dr. Mijail Serruya and his colleagues at Brown tested the device by having a monkey play a simple video game, in which the animal used the cursor to chase a moving target on a computer screen.
The monkey was able to move the cursor ``instantly'' with as much control as if it were using a computer mouse or a joystick, Serruya said. The monkey wills the cursor to move. The cursor moves.
The animals' hands-free cursor control was almost as fast and accurate as when they used their hands, the researchers reported. So far, three monkeys have received the implant.
Linked to a personal computer, the cursor-control device ``would work for anything you can do or you can imagine doing by pointing and clicking. This includes reading e-mail,'' Donoghue said. ``Or imagine an on-screen keyboard that someone can use to type sentences or issue commands by pointing and clicking.''
The Brown implant system uses an array of 100 tiny electrodes to detect electrical activity from a pinprick of neurons -- between seven and 30 motor cortex cells -- and feed it through a cable to a personal computer.
There, a formula the Brown group designed turns the brain activity into instructions a computer can use to plot the cursor movements. That software interpreter uses a fairly straightforward application of textbook algebra, the scientists said.
The system is so small and draws so little power that any future device developed for human use could easily be made wireless, said biomedical engineer Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
It may be a decade or more before any clinical product is ready for testing, however. So little is known about tapping the neural activity of the human brain that researchers are likely to proceed slowly. No one knows, for example, what the effect would be of having such an electrode in the brain for years or whether over time the implant might lose its ability to function. ``This implant is potentially one that is very suitable for humans,'' Serruya said. ``It shows enough promise that we think it could ultimately be hooked up via a computer to a paralyzed patient. ``We want to be careful that the implant is suitable and safe,'' said Serruya. ``There are a few technical details that we are still working on.'' The Brown researchers have filed for a patent on the technique and formed a company called Cyberkinetics to develop medical applications.
Other research groups in recent years have announced encouraging successes in experiments with devices designed to turn brain commands into computer instructions. Until now, these were limited in their potential usefulness by technical constraints.
What makes the newest effort to link brain and machine remarkable is the ease with which it can be learned and the small number of neurons it requires to operate, Mussa-Ivaldi said.
"There are a mountain of things we still need to know," he said. "But this is progress."