The controller reminds you of a Xbox 360 controller but its actually a specialized controller developed by an associate professor and some engineering students. Check out the special controller after the jump.
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University of Utah mechanical engineering professor William Provancher would play video games to relax and take his mind off of work. Instead, all of that thumb-twitching game playing gave him a potentially multi-million dollar engineering idea.
The associate professor and three of his engineering students have devised a new video game controller that not only rumbles when you play, but it also has thumb-sized joysticks that stretch, push and pull your thumbs to simulate force feedback. With it, you can feel the sensation of a fishing line tugging or the direction and impact of a nearby explosion.
The professor and his students are demonstrating their new technology this week at the Haptics Symposium in Vancouver, a conference dedicated to the physical feedback between computers and human operators. Provancher hopes to have the technology implemented in the next generation of game consoles that are expected to debut in the next few years.
Check Out This Custom Game Controller!!!
“As a researcher you’re always trying to get it [the technology] out into the real world,” Provancher said from Vancouver. “If a thousand people read my paper that’s great. But it’s better if a hundred thousand use your technology in a product.”
Basic force feedback was first introduced in video games in arcade machines as far back as 1976 with Sega’s “Moto-Cross,” in which the player felt a rumble of the handlebars whenever crashing into another motorcycle. The first force feedback for home gaming consoles was a “rumble pak” for the Nintendo 64 in 1997. Since then, gaming consoles including today’s PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have built-in basic rumble in their controllers.
On first view, Provancher’s controller looks like an Xbox 360 gamepad with two thumbsticks and two rows of buttons. But what’s different are additional motors inside the controller that move the tiny joystics independently. So if you play a military shooting game, the thumbsticks can simulate the player crawling along the ground in a prone position. Or if you fire a gun, it simulates the recoil.
“There is what I call a red ‘tactor’ that moves under your thumb, and it stretches the skin under your thumb, and you can feel the direction of that skin stretch,” Provancher said. “So after you’ve cast out your line in a fishing game and are waiting for the fish to bite, you can feel them [the joysticks] move left and right like you’re under the sea, the same way you see the kelp garden move with a wave.”
The professor had been working on this form of haptic feedback for a few years, thinking he could apply it to mobile devices for navigation or for a portable MP3 player to get physical feedback whenever you’re scrolling through a list of songs. Then he realized he could further the development of video game controllers when he started playing shooting games like “Call of Duty.”
“I was getting to a point where I needed to blow off some steam, so I started playing video games,” he said. “It was tough for me — a 38-year-old at the time — to play video games, so I thought touch feedback could help me.”
