How Sony’s PS5 designers turned the PlayStation into something you can feel

When my colleague Andrew Webster evaluated the PlayStation 5, he explained how the next generation of Sony video games is something you can’t see – you need to Touch. Part of this is how the intelligent motorized actuators of the DualSense controller and intensely accurate vibrations can recreate the crushing feeling of a sandy beach or the pattering of rain.

Another part: the 40,000 little PlayStation symbols you’ll feel when you get the new PS5 gamepad. As an Easter egg for its fans, the company decided to apply a microtexture across the underside of the DualSense controller that makes it Sony’s most clingable gamepad so far, because of the thousands and thousands of small squares, triangles, circles and crosses literally at your fingertips.

Sony has not previously spoken about Like did that, how many there are or how big the symbols really look, but we have those answers today – including behind-the-scenes photos and details from Sony’s Yujin Morisawa and Takeshi Igarashi, the main designers behind PS5 and DualSense respectively. (We even borrowed a sophisticated industrial microscope so you can see what the symbols look like up close).

Perhaps the most impressive part, as you will see in the images above and below: these tiny symbols are stacked on top of each other, projecting in three dimensions. They are not a single layer with uniform spacing, like the small dots you should remember in Sony’s DualShock 4 2013. They look random, almost organic – which may be because the entire design was hand-drawn.

And not just an outline. Morisawa, the Senior Art Director of the Product Design Group at the Sony Design Center, explains that a variety of designs were made by hand, digitized, simulated, applied to real prototypes of gamepads and tested repeatedly until teams found the balance they wanted: beautiful, textured enough to be comfortable and non-slip, but not so rough that it would hurt your hands during a long game session.

While designers can easily place the digital version of the texture wherever they want in Sony CAD programs, Morisawa says that comparing and physically testing different prototypes was key: “Although it takes a considerable amount of time to create a prototype, the ‘go / no O judgment of a product is determined the moment you see and touch it, ”he told us by email.

Finding the appropriate heights of the symbols was a lot of work in itself, as you can see in some of the Sony backstage photos. In the end, they settled in two layers – one about 15 microns high and one 30 microns high, according to measurements we made with a Nikon LV100 microscope.

In fact, applying the symbols to the DualSense gamepad was the easy part – because they are not applied at all. Each of these 40,000 symbols is part of the controller housing, created when drops of melted ABS plastic are squeezed into small, laser-cut slits during the standard injection molding process.

The trick is to have the right equipment to make this mold. To create these precise shapes across a three-dimensional curved surface, designed to fit in your palms, lasers were useful. Specifically, a state-of-the-art multi-axis laser engraving machine that Igarashi says is “hard to find”. The result? As part of the mold, the texture you will feel on the PS5 controller is the same as any other owner will feel.

Sony’s PlayStation controller undoubtedly defined decades of gamepads, so it was no surprise when, for example, Google’s Stadia Controller came with the same kind of dotted texture that Sony introduced with DualShock 4 in 2013. But this time time, Sony’s microtexture isn’t just for your hands; the almost nonexistent PlayStation symbols are part of the PS5 experience wherever you look. You will find them on both side panels of the PS5 console, on the inner edge. They adorn the handles of the PS5’s optional media remote control, the DualSense charging station, the PS5 camera and also the Sony Pulse 3D wireless headset.

They even appear in at least one game: Astro’s Playroom, the indispensable PS5 pack-in, uses texture prominently on multiple floors and walls. Makes sense. It’s not just star a celebration of the company’s gaming history, it is filled with Easter eggs from the PlayStation, including some that mock Sony itself.

In the PS3 era, Sony used to feel arrogant, a little certain that fans would devour everything it had to offer – $ 599 consoles with giant enemy crabs, proprietary discs and memory cards for its ambitious notebooks, a competitor of Smash Bros. without enough beloved video game franchises to back up – but the PlayStation has not only gained a lot of goodwill since then, but has become more self-conscious. If the company can stay that way for the entire PS5 lifecycle (and, you know, allow people to buy one), I have no doubt that it will be a winner.