Games as Medicine - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

right well what we're going to talk about is the way we're using stereographics to try and deal with a medical condition that affects around four percent of the people in the world it's one of the most common eye complaints that people have and you'll know what that looks like because you'll have seen kids even if you haven't been one yourself who are wearing a patch over one eye and that's the main way we've had for the last 100 years to treat those children i started getting interested in computer games because i love playing computer games and then i wonder well how do computer games work how can i make them better how can i make really good games so we've been looking at how we can use games to treat something called amblyopia we're showing on the left here what you'd see with your left hand eye when you're wearing these stereo glasses and in the right hand channel we're showing what you'd see with your right eye and by mixing the two together by flashing between the two you see one image but one eye sees one side of it and the other right is the other to create our games what we have to do is make one scene for the weak eye and one scene for the strong eye and ambi oprah involves you having one good eye one bad eye and what we're trying to do on the right here we've got the background the main character and on the left here we have the character in the background again but we have targets that you're aiming for so you're trying to catch these stars now to get this to do this actually goes against what the dario graphics card we're using wants to do so behind me is peter lavalle who's the head programmer for our project and he can tell you about the way in which we've had to manipulate the technology so it does the work we need to do for us when you do 3d graphics you'll end up with three dimensional data x y and z coordinates that you twist around and put into 3d space the final step does something like a camera lens to put it in a sort of a cone the far stuff gets smaller than your stuff gets bigger someone figured out this really clever idea of making their computer sneak in and at that last step pull everything apart so that they could take existing games and make them 3d make them like a 3d movie and then as they were writing this software they said hey we'll also enable this quad buffering option from the from the 90s where you can draw different images to different eyes unity set up for for split screen stuff like this we draw the two images over themselves and we draw them in a very specific order and this lets us use an existing off-the-shelf tool like unity to just do the stereoscopic rendering with different stuff in each eye that you really wouldn't want to use normally because it causes really horrible eye strain what you're saying is you're using an older model for the kind of graphics because it's easier modern stuff to deal with right yes yeah we're using the these older or more mature direct 3d 9 stuff and we're sending that to open gl surfaces and then opengl supports the quad buffering thing this all exists because hull had students and they knew that their students could relatively easily use unity 3d for their coursework and they wanted the students to be able to program their hulls vr cave that's the university hole in north england yes they have a vr cave uh built from uh also nvidia projectors and nvidia stuff so we knew that their software solution to tricking unity into doing stereo rendering would work with the same equipment we were trying to use and that meant we could take a lot of grunt work out of this project by just using unity and wrapping it through this quantifier we call it because it adds quad buffering to an existing technolo an existing thing an existing engine and so is there an easy way of thinking what this quad buffering is doing is it turning it into four screens rather than two it's sort of a pun on the concept of double buffering if you're thinking of um someone drawing a cartoon they're going to draw a cartoon and then show you the image they've drawn the double buffering means that the computer draws something you're not seeing and then it shows you what it's drawn before starting to draw the next thing and flipping the two images back in place sometimes they'll do triple buffering and they'll have one car one image ready for the monitor to display another one in the process of the monitor displaying and then the computer working on the third and quad buffering is sort of a pun because you're adding a second screen so it looks to the software to the developer to the programmer to someone like me it looks like you're drawing two images per frame and because they both have this back off screen buffer you're drawing to that's then flipped with the front buffer it's one two three four quad buffering when we started i i like any good programmer thought i could do it all from scratch that i'm still sure that i could have but it would have been harder to collaborate with other people on the team um the big sort of challenge has been reducing the getting everything to just sort of line up right so that it works without touching without fixing without oh you have to hit control q so that would sort of be the big challenge would be because this is supposed to go into somebody's home and we we they won't have a keyboard and mouse and we assume they have no technical expertise and it has to just work and then we're doing this weird little cocktail of software it ends up being slightly frustrating most of what we do in universities is really good stuff but it's never going to go out there and actually work in the real field it never has to just never has to just work yeah you can always but we have the position where it has to work it has to be something which is as attractive as a commercial game as fun as a commercial game and yet still do the medical stuff that we need it to do and so we've had a designer who's a pro designer from a games company working with us and we've got peter's worked in a games company um we've got me who's been developing games for a very long time and sold games before put games out there and worked with games companies as well so we're yeah we're beginning to get to the point where we ready to to roll out as a games company ourselves and then he won't get any money so rather than indie game the movie this is indie game the research group yes oh dear it's now on kickstarter so i've used the demo to try and generate some hype for the game there's a rom you can download you can play using an emulator windows mac and linux even some handheld consoles have some emulators so here you can put the rom in there and play it on there if you've got something like an overdrive cart