The startup playing with your emotions

Hello there,

Today we’re diving into the world of emotion tracking in the games industry, as we take a look at Immersely.

But first, a heads up that Sequoia has opened applications for its second Arc Europe programme.

• They’re looking for pre-seed and seed stage startups to take part in a seven-week course (they call the programme a “catalyst” rather than an ‘accelerator’) aimed at founders “with the ambition of building a category-defining company that will endure”.

• You’ll also get between $500,000 and $1 million investment from Sequoia; not a bad look for the cap table of an early-stage startup!

• You can apply here until Sunday 2 April.

Also, a quick 👋 hello to everyone who has subscribed to PreSeed Now recently.

We’re working on some really interesting things to grow this publication, and I’ll share more about them soon.

– Martin

Immersely wants to track your emotions to help the games industry

There are few more emotional pastimes than gaming. 

If I sit down with a game at the end of the day, I can feel happy about my achievements, amused by the scriptwriting, empathetic to the characters’ story… and absolutely furious at a frustrating piece of bad game design - all in the space of an hour.

It can be a rollercoaster. 

Looking to harness these emotions to help developers make more successful games is Immersely, a startup using smartwatches to track how players feel as they play.

Goodness Akalazu is the founder of the Sheffield-based startup that has developed tech to collect biometric data from Wear OS smartwatches for Android phones, such as recent Google and Samsung watches. 

Smartwatches were chosen as an easily available, widely owned way of collecting biometric data, and Akalazu says Apple Watch support is in the works. 

The biometric activity is measured alongside data about what’s happening in the game, and what the player is doing. From there, Akalazu says, this data is fed through an A.I. model based on his academic research, to estimate what a player was feeling, alongside the context of why they were feeling that way.

“We build a map around the player's journey throughout the game; where you have lows and highs, and things [developers] could do to change that.”

And while right now this is all about tweaking a game’s design, Akalazu imagines a day when the data could be used to dynamically personalise games for each player on the fly as they play.