This Headset Makes Gaming Harder as Your Stress Level Increases

Gaming can already be pretty stressful; heck, I used to get stressed blowing the dust out of NES cartridges.

Now, former Samsung/IBM/Nike designer Samuel Matson has hacked together a system called Immersion (via Polygon) that makes video games more difficult as you get more stressed out. If it works, the system could get you to handle your gaming stress better, which is both healthier for you and, hypothetically, better for your gaming performance.

Here’s how it works. Matson concocted his system using a modified Xbox controller and a headset that detects the wearer’s pulse. The headset measures the player’s heart rate, sending a signal to the gaming system via Bluetooth to increase the game’s difficulty, should the heart rate rise. The faster the pulse rate, the more bad guys pop up in the first person shooter – and the harder those bad guys are to kill.

Ideally, this would make you more tranquil when playing video games: It gives you an incentive, after all, to remain calm.

(Fun fact: The designer was apparently inspired by his brother’s own rage-fueled Call of Duty bouts.)

You can think of Immersion as one of those collars that sprays citronella in a dog’s face to stop it from barking – a way of conditioning a response. Only here, Immersion is attempting to lower stress, rather than to stop barking, and the conditioning may actually involve increasing stress levels if the gamer can’t handle himself.

Will Immersion  actually decrease gaming stress? The jury’s still out on this one. But if enough gamers are looking to wean themselves off of gaming, or are in the market for some good practical joking, there may be a place for the headset after all.

You can read more about the Immersion headset here.

Yahoo Tech is a brand new tech site from David Pogue and an all-star team of writers. Follow us on Facebook for all the latest.