A new Skyrim VR mod called Real Virtual Magic measures your brain activity to alter the power of your spells in-game. The mod makes you feel like a real mage by requiring you to enter a state of focus to use the arcane arts.
“[The idea] already was there when I started the PhD,” Marius Klug, a PhD researcher and the creator of this mod, tells me. “I want to feel like a mage because I'm a very rational person. I don't believe that magic exists in real life, but I wish it did. Being able to live that in virtual reality with something that is as close to real magic as you can possibly get - that is what I want to do.”
The mod measures your focus to fill your Magicka bar - if it’s full, your spells are more potent. The mod uses “EEG - electroencephalography - the measurement of the electrical activity of the brain,” Klug explains. “It also measures electrical activity from muscles around the face and in the neck. It picks up signals from the eyes and from everywhere in your surroundings."
Real Virtual Magic completely overhauls how you cast spells in Skyrim VR. You can now fire off an infinite amount of Sparks or Ice, but you’ll need to ‘focus’ your mind to make them do any real damage. The Magicka bar is replaced with a focus bar - if it’s empty, no damage, if it’s full, double damage.
Klug explains that he hasn’t invented a mod that can read your mind. “I use the EGG alpha by theta ratio, which is a very basic and very common measure,” Klug says . “It's more a focusing on the inner parts. If you focus on your breath or sensory information that comes from inside of your body, that's a different signature than what comes from the outside. I cannot really say what does the focus because it's different for every human - every brain is different.
Accessibility is important to Klug, and he believes this is the first BCI (brain-computer interface) feature in a game that is both fun and relatively affordable. All need the game, a VR headset, the Muse meditation device, and a BLED112 bluetooth dongle - no installation, aside from the mod itself, is necessary.
As a scientist, Klug is excited about the possibilities this mod opens up. “I want to demystify it - to make people excited, but also, not scare them away and be very clear about what can be done and what cannot be done,” he explains. “What cannot be done is ‘I think fireball and then I get a fireball’, at least not with current technology. We can only measure general mental states. We cannot measure precise thoughts. I cannot read your mind and if you share the data I have no way of knowing what you thought.”
The mod works by using the Muse meditation band to measure your brain activity. It then feeds that information to the game via the dongle. If you remain focused, your Magicka bar will fill and you’ll be able to cast spells for as long as you can maintain that focus. Like a real master of the arcane arts, you have to remain calm while a dragon tries to chomp your face off if you have any hope of lobbing fireballs powerful enough to bring it down.
Klug hopes to improve upon the mod, using head movement, heart rate, or anything that reveals a player’s mental state. He also hopes he can gather voluntary user-generated data. “I want to emphasise that all EEG data processing is done locally on the machine of the player,” he reassures me. “Nothing goes through the internet. Nothing is recorded if you don't want to. There is no way I can access the data if you don't voluntarily send it to me - everything is done locally and the source code is open. It's important to me that people feel like they can trust this, because I am well aware of the difficulty of privacy in physiological sensing. This is an important issue. The mod features the option to create a local data file for each play session. This can be disabled, then nothing is stored at all.”
You can download the mod on Nexus already. You can also join the RVM (Real Virtual Magic) Discord server to keep up to date with any advancements Klug makes. He also has a website which details his academic work.
“To make magic experienceable as though it was real, we have to tap into the mind,” Klug says. “That is what the mod does - what future versions of the mod will do much better. The player should feel that the magic comes from within and not from pressing a button.”