Sony has always been thinking of innovative features to add to the PlayStation's controllers. It all started with the additional analog sticks and rumble feature on the original PlayStation controller — which is where the DualShock name comes from; a name that has recently been dropped.
That's right, the PlayStation 5 is no longer incuding a DualShock, as Sony has renamed the controller to DualSense; a peripheral that the company believes will be a game changer as we are about to enter the next generation of video game consoles.
There are a bunch of new features that made the DualSense controller a state of the art device, but the new Haptic Feedback feature is the one that Sony believes will be revolutionary, as it aims to give players an even more immersive than any other controller on the market.
According to information recently spotted on Sony's official website, the PlayStation 5's DualSense controller will give players an even more immersive experience by reacting to in-game sounds, and all of this is made possible via haptic vibration waveforms that Sony reassures everyone can easily use; in this case, developers themselves.
"Although DualSense will allow for more realistic game experiences, creators will also need more time and know-how to create high quality vibrations. To reduce this burden, we have created a haptic vibration waveform design environment that anyone can use easily. In this way, we have not only developed a tool that allows game creators to design an impactful, natural and comfortable vibration waveform in fewer steps, but also created a method of almost automatically generating vibration patterns from a game’s sound effects," reads the information shared by Sony.
In the past, rumble features usually react to in-game movement — be it steps, falls, gun shots, and similar stimuli — but the new DualSense technology allows players to feel sound waves for a more immersive experience; a concept that has not been developed before.
"The focus of our development was deep neural network technology, but the problem was that there were few past studies that applied this technology to the sense of touch rather than to images and sounds. In the beginning, we spent many days just agonizing over the data. Later, we studied and examined different algorithms while getting advice from experts. This allowed us to automate the generation of high-quality vibration waveforms to a certain extent, making it look as if they were created manually by the creators."
Rumble features were first introduced by Nintendo in 1997 with the Rumble Pack, and has since become a feature that every other developer has implemented. Sony seems to have taken notes from Nintendo's latest HD Rumble feature and taken it to the next level with the DualSense's Haptic Feedback, and we can't wait to see what developers do with this, and innovative new technology.