Immersion Queries Lack Of PS3 Controller Rumble 117
simoniker writes "Following the announcement that the PS3 controller will lack a rumble feature, Gamasutra spoke to Victor Viegas of Immersion Corporation, which is currently suing Sony over the PS2 rumble functionality, about what he feels the company's reasoning truly is. He claims of the PS3 controller having both rumble and tilt: 'I don't believe it's a very difficult problem to solve', and also said that his employees thought the PS3 controller 'felt light, that it felt cheap and flimsy, and that it lacked weight or substance.'"
Of all the things (Score:5, Insightful)
(shoving the damn thing down your pants doesn't count as making it useful)
Re:Immersion to Sony: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Of all the things (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Of all the things (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, first of all, if it was force feedback, there wouldn't even be a question of whether it's useful or not. Force feedback certainly is useful, in most cases.
But "rumble" is not the same as "force feedback". Force feedback actually gives you real sensations designed to mimic whatever's being simulated. For example, you can actually feel the stick get heavier as you bank into the wind in a flight sim. Or you can feel the steering wheel start to give way as your tires lose adhesion in a driving sim. This is great stuff, and it really makes you feel like you're "in the game".
IMO, a good tactic to counter Nintendo's Wii would have been to make a controller that truly is a force feedback controller and also works equally well with different types of games. The second part is the hard part, because force feedback is sort of a specialized function right now. But if Nintendo can make a motion-sensing controller that works with all types of games, then someone else could do the same with force feedback.
Anyway, to get back to the point, "rumble" is just a shaking mechanism; it doesn't convey any actual "force" on the controller. It's "feedback", I guess, but not "force feedback".
Even so, though, it's a useful thing to have in a lot of games, just not as useful as true force feedback. It depends on how it's implemented. In a racing game, for example, you can still simulate with a pretty good degree of accuracy that feeling of just being on the edge of losing control. You do that with different degrees of shake. Tapping other cars off to the side can be simulated with jolts, and this can actually be helpful because it's not like you can just look off to the side to see what's happening. These are the sorts of situations where "rumble" is nice to have.
There are games where it's basically useless and where it actually may get annoying after a while. Some games have it just to have it; I've played puzzle games where just putting a puzzle piece down results in a jolt from the rumble motors. That sort of thing just gets tiring.
But a lot of games - especially simulators of any kind, action shooters and the like - will miss it.
Crazy patent (Score:5, Insightful)
"Viegas is confident, however, that his company's technology will be at home on video game systems in the future."
They call this technology ?! They call this piece of crap of two different weight lead spinning over an axis a "force-feedback and so-called "haptic" (engaging the user via the sense of touch)". A Patent was awarded over this ? Surely I'm not the only one to think that PATENT LAWS should be revisited ?
Happy for me that this technology is a piece of crap I can live without... and I'm a video game programmer specialized in Input.
Re:Of all the things (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Rumble is a PITA (Score:3, Insightful)
So Sony has to deal with the fact that rumble sucks batteries, interferes with the tilt sensors, and has to deal with the Immersion lawsuit. It's a no-brainer, kill the feature.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Wario says (Score:5, Insightful)
However: these are not normal circumstances.
Have you ever played a game called Wario Ware Twisted?
Wario Ware Twisted was a Game Boy game that came out last year. It is very possibly the best GBA game of all time. It also, interestingly, is probably the best glimpse we have into what the PS3 tilt controller will work like.
Wario Ware Twisted had some kind of gyroscope built into it which could both tell which way you were tilting the GBA, as well as provide rumble feedback. The point of the game was that it would provide you a bunch of tiny tasks in rapidfire succession ("cut this carrot!" "stomp on this turtle!" "dodge this rock!" etc.), give you 5 seconds to complete the task, and then immediately move on to the next one, as if someone had put an NES in a blender. The trick is, all of these microgames were played using nothing but the tilt sensor and the A button.
Because, unlike the Nintendo Wii and its remote control / 3d mouse, WWT is played on something that "feels like" a traditional controller (i.e. a GBA or DS), Wario Ware Twisted is probably actually closer to how the PS3 controller ought to work than the Wii demos that Nintendo has shown so far.
One of the surprising things about Wario Ware Twisted is that, although under normal conditions I personally consider rumble to normally be a stupid gimmick, once you slapped in the tilt sensor the rumble became absolutely necessary, and after playing Wario Ware Twisted it is very hard to imagine tilt sensing working without rumble.
This is why: part of good interface design is providing feedback. An example we see on a computer might be a button; when you click on the button, it provides feedback by visually highlighting, signalling to the user, hey, you pressed a button. That would be an example in a graphical user interface. However when you are designing a tactile interface, like a video game controller, you need to provide tactile feedback. When you press a button on a controller or a key on a keyboard, you feel the key depressing under your hand. When you move a mouse on a desk you feel the mouse dragging across the mousing surface. The point in all cases is, the user needs guidance to know, hey, that thing you did, it did something. The user can figure out what's happening even withut this guidance, but it just won't feel natural.
And part of what makes Wario Ware Twisted feel natural is the guidance of tactile feedback. Whenever the tilt sensor is active, it emits little rumble jolts every time it registers a reading. This means that when you turn the controller, it "resists" in your hand, or provides the illusion of doing so, to give the impression you are actually "turning" something. Furthermore the game is set up so that the "heavier" the thing you're controlling is, the greater the feedback. The rumble "resistance" is greater in a microgame where the controller is moving the earth than in a microgame where you are moving a fly. Meanwhile when you turn the GBA quickly the resistance comes quicker than when you turn it slowly, giving immediate feedback that you are having a greater effect.
The GBA is no harder to turn when the resistance is present, but just the feel of the thing gives you a clear idea, straight to your reflexes without any need to think about it, when I tilt the controller, is it having any effect? And how much effect is it having? The extent to which this adds to the natural feeling of the game is quite startling.
This is why, hilariously-- although there are claims that Sony took out the rumble to prevent it from interfering with the tilt control-- the Dual Shake needs rumble exactly because it has tilt control. Sony's tilt control is going to be effectively one step behind a Game Boy game released last year.
Why can't you do rumble and motion sensing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Of all the things (Score:2, Insightful)
I worded that post a bit wrong, I meant to say "if it's that important to some people". Some surely consider it a gimmick that's getting old by now, while others would be happy to have more of it, those are the reasons not to have it built in anymore,
Re:Of all the things (Score:3, Insightful)
A good use of rumbling (Score:2, Insightful)