Sony has been evolving its controller designs since the original PlayStation. While it didn’t invent the idea of rumble, 1999’s DualShock helped to popularise it and the Japanese company, which has a reputation for innovative hardware, has never stopped tweaking and iterating.
For the PS3, it added Sixaxis, while the PS4’s DualShock 4 featured a touch pad and light bars. The PlayStation 5’sDualSensemight be Sony’s best design yet, with the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers helping to immerse players in such games as Returnal, Horizon Forbidden West, and Gran Turismo 7, to name a few. And from the looks of a new patent, Sony isn’t stopping anytime soon.
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Thepatent(viaexputer) describes a gel-like material that has elastic properties, allowing a controller to deform in some way if it were to be implemented. “The shape or hardness of the portions of the elastic members 11 (grips) changes in response to a process performed by [a game]”, the patent says.
How would this be useful? Well, the patent details a use case. “For example, to present the material of a virtual object in a game space to the user as a haptic sensation”.
Not only that, the patent reveals how a controller could change temperature during gameplay to reflect something in the game, such as a fiery sword, let’s say, making the controller warm to the touch, or conversely you’re in an icy environment and the controller feels cooler.
The background to the patent talks about how gaming controllers typically use materials that are “relatively difficult to deform” such as plastics, while this new invention is supposed to provide a controller “capable of enriching haptic experiences”. How it will go about this has to do with the deformable elastic as well as sensors, both of which should contribute to improved haptic feedback with vibrations better able to travel through the controller via the elastic material.
This is how it is described, anyway. Players would want to feel it for themselves in practice, of course, but since the DualSense has been widely praised for its ability to emulate in-game effects, such as weather effects like rain as well as different surfaces, it wouldn’t be too unimaginable that Sony could implement the patent practically.
Besides the gel material, the patent briefly includes mention of AI. Sony could use AI to automatically detect how severe the deformation would be, and record that for better haptic feedback, while the controller would sense all the actions performed by the player including pinching, twisting, and other inputs that would deform the controller’s material.
Overall, it sounds like an interesting concept, and Sony has a habit for intriguing ideas. While the company has various patents, it also doesn’t mean all of them will be implemented in market products, but it does allow Sony to use them in future if it wants. In other news, Sony might havea new handheld in the works.
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