If you鈥檙e not scared, you will be. A new virtual reality horror game uses the player鈥檚 heart rate to gauge how scared they feel, and if they鈥檙e not scared enough, it intensifies the horror.
To play Stigma, people use a virtual reality headset and a heart rate sensor. Players make their way through dark and creepy corridors. If their heart rate increases after coming across unexpected dead ends and creatures scuttling around their feet, the game takes that as a sign they are scared enough and continues unaltered.
But if their heart rate remains steady, players are directed down a scarier route that ramps up the number of creepy visual features, and strange sounds like footsteps are added into the mix too.
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Fear can be difficult to measure, says Yasuo Kawai at Bunkyo University and one of the creators of the game. Your heart rate increases when you are scared to pump more blood to your brain and muscles, so you can respond to whatever is scaring you. But heart rate also increases with other emotional states, like excitement and arousal.
Other heart rate monitoring games also exist. challenges players to stay calm amidst stressful situations, such as trying to escape from rooms filled with blood. And virtual reality experience has become popular as a anxiety reducer for children, by serving up soothing experiences in a fantasy underwater world that help lower heart rate and breathing patterns.
Stigma was demonstrated at the .
