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.

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.

Based on fan reactions to the patent on Reddit, nobody seems particularly enamoured with the idea either, instead joking about how it’d essentially be the PlayStation equivalent of the Bop It toy, which also involves twisting and pulling to play it.

Others, meanwhile, have found cruder interpretations of buttons you can pinch. ‘I can’t wait to pinch Kratos,’ writes Howerev, which NotTakenGreatName follows up with, ‘Tweak the nips to improve dps [damage per second].’

One fan’s immediate response to the patent is to just post a GIF of Kasumi from the Dead Or Alive fighting games (if you know, you know), with another adding, ‘GTA 6 prostitutes is gonna be next level [sic].’

This comment by geoshippo probably sums it up best: ‘The duality of gamers. Either Bop It or porn.’ Although we got a chuckle out of UnsupportableEarmuff’s suggestion for how it can be used in a new The Last Of Us game to ‘feature a scene where you twist the controller to physically choke the life out of some guy.’

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.

It is also rumoured that Sony’s planning a handheld PlayStation 6, which seems to be a separate device from the home console, that can also play PlayStation 4 and 5 games.

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