Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Jul 30th, 2010
As someone who’s been around the gaming world since the dawn of the Atari 2600 era, I thought I’d seen it all when it comes to controllers… everything from standard joysticks and gamepads to paddles to light guns to dance mats to bizarre concoctions of plastic and electronics that look more like props from a low-budget sci-fi flick from the ’80s. And with the advent of force-feedback and analog controls, we’ve seen new vistas in “immersiveness” in recent years.
Get ready to meet another one — temperature feedback.
At this year’s SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, researchers from the Tokyo Metropolitan University have been demoing a new kind of game controller, one with two thermoelectric surfaces on either side of the pad where it’s held by the player. These surfaces react to game conditions and will accordingly increase or decrease in temperature when (for example) your character launches a flamethrower at his opponents, or when your mage eats an Ice spell.
Don’t worry about scalding or freezing your own hands; the temperature differences are not great, having been estimated at around ten degrees (Fahrenheit) above or below the norm, and it takes a relatively long time (about five seconds) to top out in either direction. But it’s believed that, like the mild rumble provided by most force-feedback systems, it’ll be just enough to provide to gamers that extra little bit of realism that helps convince them they’re “really there.”
Now, this all sounds pretty far-fetched to me, but then, I used to think that Sony’s Dual Shock technology was a gimmick that would fade away. Now it’s virtually standard equipment for game controllers, be they for consoles or computers. So my gut isn’t always the best judge of these things, but even so, this is something worth keeping an eye on. It’s a little thing, but I can see potential in something like this for engaging yet another human sensory perception in the ever-more-complex world of video games.
But after all this time, where the hell is Smell-O-Vision?
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