While talking recently via Google Hangouts to several groups of students from various schools, Valve’s legendary Managing Director Gabe Newell talked about his interest in a budding but ground breaking technology that could turn games into truly immersive experiences.

Another area of technology that I’m very interested in is that the ability to talk directly to people’s brains, is getting better a lot faster and a lot sooner than I expected.

There’s research going on right now to directly generate images inside of people brains. It’s not just “hey cool, I’m gonna plug a VGA connector at the back of my skull,” but it actually opens up fairly sience-fictiony abilities, fairly soon in terms of the subjective experience that we can create for the people.

And it’s kind of surprising that it’s happening at the rate that it is, rather than… It used to be fairly confortable to think “oh way off in the future.” Well, you know, the fundamental science it’s being done right now, that will enable us to start doing these things.