By Morgan Richards
Controllers have gone through many changes over the years, developing to become more complex to keep up with the demand from games themselves to push bounds and improve to keep audiences enthralled and entertained. Despite the amount of development controllers have gone through, design wise they haven't actually changed all that much, when you hear the word controller a very clear image comes to mind; two joysticks (left and right), a D pad (directional pad), two right triggers, two left triggers, 4 buttons, modern gyroscope functions and the start buttons. And that's what the pretty standard layout has been, obviously with PS4 now integrating a touch bar on theirs they’ve stepped the game up a bit in terms of development, while xbox controllers look like they haven't changed at all. But all in all not much has changed.
Then with motion controllers coming into the scene and it opened new doors into the possibilities of games and further lead into VR gaming, but they were still following a standard design, basically a stick with some lights. Don’t get me wrong, the sticks worked well for the games being produced around the controller, but the world was not satisfied with these conventional shaped controls, the needed weird ones proven by someone playing Dark Souls 3 with bananas hooked up as controllers.
But recently Nintendo have come through with a cute gimmick controller for the Pokemon game for the Switch, it's a Pokeball that you can throw to catch Pokemon in game and it acts like an actual ball. It vibrates in sync with the Pokemon struggling against being captured. LEDs on the ball also work to indicate how your attempt at containing it are. There's also a feature where you can put your favourite Pokemon in the ball to ‘look after it’, petting the ball, walking with it ect. I mean it does sound a bit odd but kind of cool right?
Who hasn’t played a Pokemon game and thought about actually throwing a ball to capture one, the tech behind it is in no way new but there’s just that added joy from it not being a traditional stick shaped motion controller, it coming in a shape makes it so much more enjoyable. So with the success of this controller it's a wonder why more things like it haven’t been made in the past or will this spark a new generation of controllers available to accentuate the gaming experience. In possible new wave of interesting controllers could haptic gloves take off in the gaming scene soon.
Is a world with gaming systems similar to those seen in Ready player one closer than we thought?
Currently haptic gloves have been used to help the blind ‘see’ art, specifically sculptures, the gloves have done this by having a 3D model of the statue and setting up so when the gloves came close to ‘contact’ with it in the software the gloves would vibrate imitating touch, this use of the gloves is very impressive and amazing jump for how the disabled can view and experience art. It make you wonder how long it could be until this is applied creativity to games, game creation or even sculpting and modelling. How amazing would it be to see a world in VR but then be able to interact with it in an increasingly immersive way that motion controllers have never offered before, considering the Pokeballs immersive nature this is just the start. Currently there are VR softwares that are a virtual space canvas that the user can completely move around in to create 3D art, this currently uses the general shaped motion controllers, but how much better and intuitive could an artist be to their work by being able to actually feel it.
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