Ingame breathing synced with rl.

[Pheregrim]

I just saw Spacewalk - An Ocolus Rift-enabled space exploration game. which looks like a awesome game btw, props to Richard Emms.
and we've all been on skype and heard that one guy that newer manages to place his microphone right, which actually happened to me this morning, and that combination got me thinking:

When you have games where the only audio experience you're getting is your own breathing, like a space game, a underwater game, or any game where you have a helmet or a device or anything that makes your breathing pronounced, or like some horror games have done, used breathing as a way of measuring your ingame characters level of fear, with virtual reality, why not use your rl breathing as a game mechanic, this could be implemented in numerous different ways, why not not sync up your real life breathing with the ingame one for a more enhanced experience?

I'd imagine all it would take was a microphone 'well' placed infront of your mouth/below your nose, use that input as ingame breathing output.

I personally think small things like that really would add to the vr experience.

That being said, I'm no programmer, so I have no idea how hard or easy this would be to implement, I'm just a enthusiastic gamer sharing my ideas ( :

Only you can prevent forest fires,
Pheregrim.

[EVIL]

You could use sensors to measure your pulse and time it with ingame sounds, since microphones also take in external audio. every little bit of sound in the room would be amplified with a microphone.

[zalo]

Stretch sensors wrapped around the upper-torso (perhaps coupled with a haptic vest) should do the trick.

Used in conjunction with other biometric sensors, one could make "games" that let people reach extreme meditative states. Valve would go crazy if everyone had a breathing/sweating/heartrate monitor. They'd use their terrifying biofeedback to guide you into extreme states of terror, or bring you into a lull then scare you to death, or any other sort of devious and dastardly manipulation informed by biometry.

Right now, it's only approximate because they can only do that to playtesters and hope it works for the at-home player.

[Inscothen]

There's a guitarist(Fredrik Thordendal) who has a breath controller as an sound effect.

Maybe someone could use something like his effect box. It has MIDI out. Here's the creator's page http://www8.tfe.umu.se/personliga/jh/index.html

[virtualvision]

You could also possibly use an air pressure sensor inside of a cupped surface. This would give how hard the user is breathing as well. There's a lot of stuff you could derive from that, like lung capacity, or graphing the user's inhales and exhales.