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.'"

Of all the things

. . . 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

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

No, but it sure does increase the fun-factor for a whole lot of games...

Re:Of all the things

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

It does for me, my friend. It does for me. Now if you will excuse me I'm gonna play some Grand Turismo and drive my car against a wall.

Re:Of all the things

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.

Wario says

Under normal circumstances, I would agree here. One of my favorite things about the Wavebird on the gamecube was that it didn't have rumble, which meant I never had to hunt for the configuration menu to turn the rumble off.

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

obvious

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.

Immersion to Sony:

"Your controller sucks! Rumble would make it so much better! Quit trying to avoid paying us royalties or we'll keep telling people your console is a cheap piece of crap!"

I don't mind the rumble, but I won't miss it.

I was too lazy to turn it off, and only did so if it repeatedly got in my way while playing. I liked it in some games because it warned me that something was starting to happen, sometimes before I saw it on screen, like rocks falling. Which gave me the upperhand. I won't however miss it as I don't think it's all that important of a feature to have.

How about "We lost the Immersion patent lawsuit"

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.

Please ask anyone else, anywhere.

Of all people to ask about it, they pick this guy? Call me picky, but if people ever need an objective explanation of some choice I made, I'd hope they'd get it from someone other than someone who happened to be fighting the fight of their life with me over the exact choice.

Crazy patent

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.

MGS4

I saw an interview with the creator of the Metal Gear Solid games talking about 4 on the PS3. They asked him about the lack of rumble (MGS being on the of few, if only games that used it for something that legitimately enhanced game-play). He said that his understand was that the PS3 controllers are going to have motion sensors in them (I guess like the Wii controller) and that you couldn't do both motion sensors and rumbling.

That kind of makes sense, but you could certainly provide both and let the game pick which to use (using both simultaneously would probably not work for obvious reasons). I'm guessing that is Sony's official excuse rather than saying "we lost a patent lawsuit".

Given the choice, I would much rather have a controller with motion sensors (and games designed to used them intelligently) rather than rumble any day. Contra would have been more fun for me if throwing the controller around actually made the player move a little faster or jump a little higher when I needed it. Let's face it, we all did this anyway, might as well make a controller that understands it.

Finkployd

Re:MGS4

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.

Re:MGS4

Sony's motion detection is based on accelerometers. That's why it can detect tilt, but not position. Nintentdo's is based on triangulation. This is probably why Nintendo can have it both ways and Sony can't.

Rumble is a PITA

I've bought two wireless controllers from in the past. The first thing I do in any game is disable rumble. Rumble sucks the batteries down. Check the back of any wireless controller package and you'll see two expected play times listed: one without rumble, one with rumble. (I suppose it doesn't help that I find rumble annoying more often than not)

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.

gee zonk

You must be depressed as hell.

Go through all the trouble to post -yet- another Sony hater article - and people are beating up on Immersion instead.

I think that's hillarious myself.

lmao..

Hm, does this mean dildos violate it too?

Its the same crap, a small electric motor with an offset metal weight. Everything that uses this technology should violate their patent, no? Cel phones? pagers?

Why can't you do rumble and motion sensing?

Is it because the rumble would throw off the sensors? What's wrong with that? Get shot by an enemy, and the rumble throws off your aim for a second. Wouldn't that, in the end, be more realistic?

Two Easy Reasons

1. The whole thing with Immersion itself trying to sue the pants off of anything that rumbles. Sony didn't pay and was defeated in court so they "question" why the PS3 doesn't have rumble? Yeah...

2. If the controler itself has a "motion sensor" itself, ie the tilt functionality showcased in Warhawk, then having a controler that vibrated might interfere with it reporting correct user input. It isn't that the controler is delicate but the way tilt is measured is thrown off by extra forces like vibration. Feedback is "interesting" but "tilt" might be more interesting

My feeling is that Sony should offer *both* "tilt" and "rumble" if it is merly a technical issue. If it a paten issue, I'm quite happy to have them leave it out.

Durability

Just out of curiousity (since I really don't know), how do accelerometers handle being dropped on the floor, thrown on the floor in disgust, dragged across the livingroom and other things that currently happen to all controllers out there (doesn't everyone remember a controller from one of their systems that just rattles a little when you shake it)? I know we all try and take care of our toys, but if one of these gets misaligned, doesn't it kill functionality?

I know someone is going to say that buttons and dpads and analog sticks can also break too, but those don't seem like they would be as fragile.

Let me guess:

Immersion said in a press release that they were "disappointed" that Sony did not include their Intellectual Property in their upcoming high-volume console.

In other news Gates said he was "disappointed" that server rooms are moving to Linux in droves.

Rumble - excellent, when used cleverly

I must say, rumble is great in some situations, like the heartbeat in Silent Hill telling you just how damaged you are, without having a stupid 100% health gauge on-screen. I also really REALLY like it in certain racing titles like Forza Motorsport and a few others, as it gives you extra information about your car's traction, much like a real car would convey. Try it with a "Momo Force" steering wheel controller, it's a whole new experience!

For everything else, rumble is like that annoying "ding" sound they play whenever you perform some generic action. It has no purpose, except to shut up that dumb young guy who was complaining about the "lack of rumble". Do I really care that my gamepad shakes like the Pope whenever Sonic the Hedgehog walks into a wall ? Do I gain any advantage from buzzing the hell out of my fingers whenever I score a slam dunk in NBA Jam ? If anything, the gratuitous vibration becomes tiresome and makes my hands sore after a short while, so I end up turning the feature off in most games.

Rumble.. blah. Make it optional, with a big red switch on the controller to shut it off at will. Make it into a plug-in accessory for all I care. Just make sure it's built into every racing wheel and I will love your console like a crackbaby.

History repeats?

I can't help thinking these motion sensitive controllers are the Atari Mindlink all over again. It makes for mondo video clips of people slashing a virtual sword, but the the early adopters will try doing that for a couple hours... and, yeah, I know you can do the thing with little flicks. It's still going to be annoying.

And how does one get into a lawsuit over a controller's rumble function? My employer blocks, for some reason, gaming news sites.

A good use of rumbling

An excellent use of the rumble feature is in the Madden football series. If you have to make a critical field goal try at the end of the game, it puts you into a first person view, plays the sound of a heartbeat, and the rumble mimics the feel of a heartbeat. It really does totally immerse you in the moment. So, let's end this nonsense about how rumble packs are totally useless.

Errm, Immersion would say that...

The royalty cheques will stop landing on the doorstep in November...