Dread Director
A biometric game director that senses how a player feels from a webcam and pulse sensor, then adapts a horror game’s pacing in real time.
HACK THE 6IX 2026 / BIOMETRIC GAME DIRECTOR
Survive the night watch
Illustrative demoA browser mini-game. Your heart rate is a slider here; the real build reads it from a camera and pulse sensor, and nothing is captured on this page.
About this project
Dread Director changes a horror game based on how scared the player is. A Raspberry Pi with a camera and a contact pulse sensor estimates heart rate, breathing, blinking and expression, then turns the noisy signals into three values: noise, sustained stress, and composure.
A portable, deterministic C++17 director fuses the camera and pulse data, gates it by confidence, and decides what happens next: build tension, ease off when the player is overwhelmed, or give them room to recover. Games never touch raw biometrics; they receive high-level cues like escalate, panic, and recover over local UDP.
The reference game, Night Watch, is built in Unity: a stalking creature hunts harder when you stay calm and backs off when you panic. Gemini and ElevenLabs narrate reactions to what the player says, and an ESP32 + MPU6050 controller lets you swing at the monster with your own hands. Built at Hack the 6ix 2026.
How it works
- PLAYER SENSINGCamera + pulse on a Raspberry Pi
- DIRECTORC++17 cues: escalate · panic · recover
- GAME REACTSUnity monster, lights, narration
Built with
- C++17
- Unity
- OpenCV
- Raspberry Pi
- QNX
- ESP32
- Gemini API
- ElevenLabs