New PS5 controller patent lets you pinch and poke your favourite game characters

Sony believes its new controller with deformable buttons will add a new level of immersion when playing video games.

Sony has filed plenty of patents for new kinds of PlayStation controllers in the past, such as one that changes its temperature to emulate what’s happening in-game and another that can measure your heart rate.

Usually, though, they’ve still been shaped like a traditional controller, in accompanying diagrams, which is very much not the case with the newest example that’s cropped up.

Not only is it grid-shaped, but it’s designed to have deformable buttons, with the goal being to improve upon the tactile and haptic feedback features of the current PlayStation 5 DualSense controller.

The patent was discovered recently by Cheat Happens and includes a diagram of a five-by-five grid made up of buttons, which would be covered up by a cloth and be ‘capable of making complex shape changes by way of extension, contraction, and bending.’
Additionally, rather than pressing buttons to trigger actions in-game, you’d instead be able to pull, twist, or pinch them, which the patent argues would aid in making games feel more immersive.

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One example it gives is pulling on a button to make a volcano appear out of the ground and then twisting the button to make the volcano erupt.

It’d also be able to simulate in-game sensations like footsteps and gunshots, no doubt in a similar fashion to the haptic feedback used in games like Astro Bot.

It’s certainly a novel idea and we’d sooner see this become a thing than the AI tech that plays games for you, but it still very much reads as an answer to a problem that doesn’t exist.

All that aside, there’s no guarantee Sony will actually release the thing, although the PlayStation 6 is in need of some kind of unique hook, so you never know.

As it stands, all Sony’s hinted about the console is that it will use AI technology in some form but precisely what that means is a mystery.

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