One of the major advances that Sony is pushing with the PlayStation 5 is the new haptics found on its DualSense controller. These haptics are intended to create a more immersive experience, with players being able to feel the grit beneath their wheels while racing, or the rushing of the water as they swim. While many have suggested that its complexity may lead to 3rd party developers ignoring the feature, Sony has explained that it has measures in place to make development of these haptics easier.

As part of its ‘Sony Group magazine’, Sony explained that “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.”

Further explaining their process, Sony said “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.”

With the release of new technology, it is always difficult for the creator to convince others to utilise it, especially if it is particularly complex – no matter how impressive it may be. It is therefore encouraging to see Sony attempting to make the process much simpler, hopefully leading to as wide support as possible.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of the DualSense controller? Are you excited by it? Which feature are you looking forward to the most? Let us know down below.

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