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.'"

Comments

Of all the things

[DrMrLordX]

. . . that one could find wrong with the PS3, the lack of a "rumble pack" feature in its controllers is the least of my concerns. Rumble packs are worthless. After you get over the initial "thrill" of a force-feedback experience, what good are they? All they do is interfere with gameplay.

(shoving the damn thing down your pants doesn't count as making it useful)

Re:Of all the things

[badasscat]

After you get over the initial "thrill" of a force-feedback experience, what good are they? All they do is interfere with gameplay.

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

[Doodlepants]

Copied from the above link :
"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.