How Sony’s PS5 Designers Turned PlayStation Into Something You Can Feel

When reviewing my PlayStation 5, my colleague Andrew Webster explained how Sony’s next-generation video games are something you can not see – you have to become. Part of this is how the amazing DualSense controller’s cleverly motorized triggers and intensely precise vibrations can recreate the crunchy feeling of hitting a sandy beach or the rain.

Another part: the 40,000 small PlayStation symbols you will feel when you upload the new gamepad from the PS5. As an Easter egg for its fans, the company decided to make a microtextile on the DualSense controller’s entire bottom shell that makes it Sony’s most tangible gamepad to date, due to the thousands and thousands of small squares, triangles, circles and crosses literally at your fingers.

Sony has not talked about it before how it did, how many there are, or how big the symbols actually get, but we have the answers today – including behind-the-scenes photos and details of Sony’s Yujin Morisawa and Takeshi Igarashi, the chief designers behind the PS5 and DualSense respectively. (We even borrowed a luxury industrial microscope so you can see what the symbols look like up close.)

Perhaps the most striking part, as you will see in the pictures above and below: these small symbols are stacked on top of each other and protrude in three dimensions. It’s not a single, even layer at all, like the little dots you might remember on Sony’s 2013 DualShock 4. They look random, almost organic – which may be because the whole design was sketched by hand.

And not just one sketch. Morisawa, the senior art director of Sony’s Design Center Product Design Group, explains that a variety of designs are handmade, digitized, mocked, applied to real prototype playing blocks and tested over and over again until teams have the balance they want. . : nice, structured enough to be comfortable and smooth, but not so sandpaper rough that it would hurt your hands during a long game session.

While designers were able to easily place the digital version of the texture in Sony’s CAD applications, Morisawa says it was important to compare and test different prototypes: ‘Although it takes a lot of time to create a prototype, the’ go ‘no’ – the rating of a product is determined as soon as you see it and touch it, ‘he told us by email.

Determining the right heights of the symbols was a lot of work in itself, as you can see in some of Sony’s photos behind the scenes. Eventually, they settled on two layers – one about 15 microns long and another 30 microns according to the measurements we made with a Nikon LV100 microscope.

Applying the symbols on the DualSense gamepad was actually the easy part – because they are not applied at all. Each of the 40,000 symbols is part of the controller shell, which is created when beads of molten ABS plastic are pressed into small laser-cut cracks during the standard injection molding process.

The trick is to have the right equipment to make the mold. To create such precise shapes over an entire three-dimensional curved surface, intended to fit in the palms of your hands, lasers have come in handy. Specifically, a high-load, multi-axis laser engraving machine, which Igarashi says is “difficult to obtain.” The result? Because it’s part of the shape, the texture you’ll feel on the PS5 controller is exactly the same as every other owner.

Sony’s PlayStation controller probably defined dozens of gamepads, so it’s no surprise when Google’s Stadia Controller, for example, came with the same kind of dotted texture as Sony’s introduced in 2013 with the DualShock 4. But this time, Sony’s microtexture is not just for your hands; the rare PlayStation symbols are part of the PS5 experience, wherever you think. You can find it on both side panels of the PS5 console, on the inner lip. They adorn the handles of the PS5’s optional media remote control, the DualSense charging station, the PS5 camera and Sony’s Pulse 3D wireless headset.

They even appear in at least one match: Astro’s playroom, the PS5 packaging you have to play, uses the texture on a number of floors and walls. It makes sense. Not only is not Astro a celebration of the company’s history in the game, it’s packed with PlayStation Easter eggs, including a few that take good care of Sony itself.

In the PS3 era, Sony often felt arrogant, a little too sure that fans would pick up everything they had to offer – $ 599 consoles with giant enemy crabs, own disks and memory sticks for its ambitious portable, a Smash Bros. rival without enough beloved video game franchises to support it, but PlayStation has not only earned a lot of goodwill since then, but has also become more self-aware. If the company can stay that way during the life cycle of the PS5 (and, you know, let people actually buy it), I have no doubt that it will be a winner.