It’s not just a VR game, it’s a quest to help scientists fight dementia

The successful free game Sea Hero Quest is dedicated to the exploration of dementia. It has been downloaded millions of times. Playing the game will help our scientists understand in detail how our brains navigate space, and help to build the largest crowd-sourced database on human spatial navigation.

Data from game for dementia research

People with dementia can face real challenges with navigation, and it’s a problem that can occur early on in the condition. However, we still don’t have reliable data on how navigational abilities can change in the healthy brain across life. Playing the game for just a few minutes will provide this completely anonymous data to help improve our understanding of navigational cognition. We’ll create a benchmark to help determine what goes wrong in the brain for people with dementia.

Thanks to VR even more accurate measurements

It is hoped the new virtual reality (VR) version, where players use a headset to immerse themselves in a virtual world, will open the game up to more people, including those with more advanced dementia who would have difficulty playing a mobile phone game. It will also give researchers even more accurate information about the processes people use to navigate, as it monitors actions like stopping and looking around.

With the variant of Sea Hero Quest for Virtual Reality, the smallest body movements of the players are now registered. Ten times per second, the movements are recorded when the player moves in different virtual environments. Movements on all three axes of a head position can be detected.

From now on, owners of a Samsung Gear VR can download the game free of charge at the Oculus Store.