You’re playing a first-person shooter game, moving throughout the virtual world and killing off opponents one by one. Suddenly, a missile comes flying in your direction, and you have to run straight to a safe zone — just barely making it before you get blown up.
That may have only been practice, but it also measured your straight-line speed, perception, and spatial awareness through a program called AimLab, a neuroscience-based simulation training platform for esports players. AimLab is the first product by Statespace, available in beta as of last week, it was announced.
“It’s similar to the NFL Combine for esports,” Statespace co-founder Wayne Mackey, who has a PhD is in computational neuroscience, said in a statement, “but instead of measuring skills fundamental to success in football, we are measuring the fundamental skills of gaming, like perception, decision-making, and cognition. This data will not only help players know where their weaknesses are, but it will provide additional data for teams to evaluate and recruit new talent.”
Jay Fuller and Mackey founded Statespace in April while they were postdoctoral fellows in neuroscience at NYU as the brainchild of their shared love for gaming. Statespace is the platform through which Fuller and Mackey will develop a number of programs like AimLab that leverage research in neuroscience to provide important data to esports players that can help them improve upon skills.
AimLab captures data on these core skills through the simulation of the first-person shooter games that esports players know so well. Different tasks and scenarios test the cognitive and fine motor skills that gamers use but very rarely think about, especially when they’re involved in a fast-paced game.
“The eSports industry needs objective measures so that players can track and train their skills more efficiently. Games are getting so competitive that players are looking for new ways to gain an advantage,” Fuller, who has a PhD in sports medicine, said in a statement.
AimLab also uses artificial intelligence to learn players’ weaknesses and then puts the player through simulations to hone the skills a given player is lacking.
“Unlike stick-and-ball sports, in eSports it doesn’t matter how fast you can run or how high you can jump — the critical attributes are things like vision, decision-making, and hand-eye coordination,” Fuller added. “As neuroscientists, we measure these types of attributes all the time. We’re simply combing our research with our passions for video games and it applying it as eSports science.”
Fuller and Mackey’s endeavor was recently funded by a pre-seed round investment from startup incubator Expa. Statespace was also the winner of NYU’s InnoVention startup competition. So far, the AimLab product has significant interest; Fuller told SportTechie in a phone interview that thousands of people have signed up in the past week for the beta version.
The creation of AimLab follows on the heels of other software that has been developed to gain insight into esports players’ movements and provide data. Recently, ELEAGUE debuted an eye-tracking system that shows fans and broadcasters where the player is looking on the screen, and even provides insight to the player on his or her own eye movements during gameplay. Fuller said that the possibility exists for partnerships between Statespace and other esports analysis technologies, such as Tobii, which makes the eye-tracking sensor.
In an esports world where the top players can now make millions of dollars, programs like AimLab make it possible for any gamer, amateur or elite, to practice and discover through data analysis the skills that will help them reach the pinnacle of their sport. Fuller and Mackey are excited to have contributed something that can help.
The duo plan to release AimLab in full on Steam early in 2018, with an XBOX version to follow.