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Immersion Queries Lack Of PS3 Controller Rumble
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.'"
I thought that Sony's losing battle with Immersion was a pretty obvious explanation for why the PS3 control doesn't feature any sort of rumble feature. The sad thing is that I didn't see this mentioned *anywhere* last week in the articles about the new controller. Journalists everywhere seemed to take it at face-value that rumble and tilt was an either/or proposition.
This guy's the limit!
The Immmersion patent lawsuit concerning the rumble feature in the Playstation controllers must have had some bearing on the exclusion of the rumble feature from the new controller. After all, even though the judge ruled against Sony he found that Sony did not violate the patent wilfully. I would assume that by incorporating rumble into the PS3 controller that would be construed as a wilful violation of the Immersion patent. Rather than pay royalties to Immersion, I would guess that Sony decided to cut their losses and eliminate the rumble feature.
Oh, and I believe Microsoft, who was also sued for violating the patent, settled for an undisclosed sum.
Whoever decided that you can't have motion sensors and rumble at the same time apparently didn't tell this to the Wii developers, as the controller there has both.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
You can think of force feedback as a layman's term. The fancy-pants word is "Haptics" and encompasses both kinesthetic feedback, where an opposing force is directly applied to a input surface as in a FF-joystick, as well as vibrotactile feedback as in the Dual Shock where the vibration feeds-back information through the input device.
In either case, the input device provides additional information through the sense of touch than the user would have without it.
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