New Direction for Game Controllers

University of Utah engineers designed a new kind of video game controller that not only vibrates like existing devices, but pulls and stretches the thumb tips in different directions to simulate the tug of a fishing line, the recoil of a gun or the feeling of ocean waves. They are demonstrating the device and presenting studies about it during the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Haptics Symposium. Haptics deals with research about touch, just as optics deals with vision. A patent is pending on the device. The first haptic or touch feedback in game controllers came in 1997 with the Nintendo64 system’s ‘rumble pack’ that makes the hands vibrate using an off-balance motor to simulate the feel of driving a race car on a gravel road, flying a jet or dueling with Star Wars light sabers.

The latest game controller prototype looks like controllers for Microsoft’s Xbox or Sony’s PlayStation but with an addition to the controller’s normal thumb joysticks, on which the thumbs are placed and moved in different directions to control the game. The middle of each ring-shaped thumb stick has a round, red ‘tactor’ that looks like the eraser-head-shaped IBM TrackPoint or pointing stick now found on a number of laptop computer brands. Video games commonly are designed so the left thumb stick controls motion and the right controls the player’s gaze or aim. With the new controller, as a soldier avatar crawls forward, the player pushes the left thumb stick forward and feels the tactors tugging alternately back and forth under both thumbs, mimicking the soldier crawling first with one arm, then the other.

More information:

http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/a-new-direction-for-game-controllers/