杏吧原创

Modified Tetris has calming effect

The popular game has been adapted to work using the heart rate of the player to control the speed of the falling blocks

VIDEO games are notorious for raising adrenalin levels but now there鈥檚 one that calms you down.

Julian Spillane of game studio in Toronto, Canada, together with a programmer who goes by the name Ne0nRa1n, have created a version of Tetris called BioBlox. Players put one hand on a device that measures their pulse rate. As their pulse rises, so does the speed of the blocks falling from the top of the screen. That makes the game harder, creating an incentive for the player to calm down and so get a higher score. 鈥淚鈥檓 a big fan of weird input devices,鈥 says Spillane.

In 1999, Nintendo released Tetris 64, which also used pulse rate to control the speed of play, but it ran only on Nintendo鈥檚 console. BioBlox runs on Windows-based PCs and will be available online soon.

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