Philips Design's 'Relax to Win' game
By Barb Dybwad 
posted May 9th 2005 7:30AM
posted May 9th 2005 7:30AM
Alright, so you're a big shot CEO/CFO/CTO or some other flavor of high-powered acronym, but can you win this game? Your tireless, dogged determination will get you nowhere in 'Relax to Win,' a mobile game developed by Philips Design for major UK cellphone provider Orange. They've designed a device that measures your galvanic skin response and sends it wirelessly to a PC or cellphone. To play (here's the hard part), you've got to slide the device between your fingers and relax. Your character is a friendly dragon on the PC or cell screen, and the more you chill out, the more your dragon will fly. With any luck, you'll have perfected the art of becoming barely conscious in no time.
i'm first, i'm first!
it's my birthday, it's my birthday!
PS i don't give a smurf
Check out Journey to Wild Divine at http://wilddivine.com/
Phillips is a bit late to THAT party.
agghhh...when/where can we buy one? I can't find anything recent in google.
that is weird enough to warrant purchasing.
Snnxxnxxnxx... zzzzz *snort* Huh? Did someone say somethsnnnxnxnxxxx..zzzzzzzzzzzz *snort* (damn smurfs)
Clutches device. Dragon flutters feebly. Thinks: "Damn dragon!" Dragon collapses into complete intertia. Throws device at screen and goes for coffee.
The world really needs more stuff like this!
The first game where pot could be considered a performance enhancing drug.
honestly though.
that's the last thing I need, a video game to tell me I'm to tense >:-(
sorry "too" tense
The Philips Design guys have done a fantastic job on the sensor design, and fully deserve the awards and plaudits, but their press release is a little misleading as to the evolution of the Relax To Win project. As one of the inventors of the game, perhaps I can set the record straight.
"Relax to Win" was created by the MindGames group in MediaLab Europe (now defunct), back in 2001. The motivation to make the game was as a clinical aid for children with a variety of stress disorders. The three inventors were myself, Phil McDarby and Ned Augenblick, all researchers in MindGames. Originally, the game was developed to run on desktop PC's. We used an off-the-shelf biosensor, which attached to the tips of the middle and index fingers, to measure the players' state of relaxation. In order to make a good connection to the skin, we used a conductive electrode gel (a horribly gloopy green substance, which was perhaps the game's main drawback). You can check out the original game on http://mindgames.mle.ie, at the bottom of the Projects page.
To cut a long story short, Relax To Win was an instant success (it was played by Bono and The Edge, from U2, and the Irish Prime Minister among others), and received a lot of press coverage around the world. When Orange came on board as sponsors of the lab, they really loved the game, and were interested in doing something with it. I approached them with the idea of putting it on mobile phones, using a wireless biosensor. They were very enthusiastic about the idea, so we had a couple of workshops in MediaLab Europe with the Orange and Philips guys. We provided technical expertise, such as the sensor dimensions required to house the electronics, suitable body placements, and also evaluated a selection of conductive materials, to see which had the best electrical properties. The Philips people went away and thought about it for a while, and came back with the wonderful design you see in the photograph.
At that point, for various reasons, the project fizzled out. It's important to note that the electronics were never made, and the game never implemented on the phone. What you see in the picture, while brilliantly realised and a vital component of the game, is just a housing, for hardware that was never implemented.
Subsequently, myself and two other member of the MindGames team left the lab, and have been working on our own implementation of the game. We have developed the necessary electronics, and our own sensor design. The game is currently up and running on a phone, and we plan to launch the product soon.
With apologies for the length of this post,
Daragh McDonnell,
Managing Director, Vyro Games Ltd.,
http://www.vyro-games.com
Yeah, that thing is really old. I've seen somethin like that ate the Ontario Science Center a few years ago.