The Cheeto Dust Problem
The prototype
Steam Machine may have been a fairly straightforward piece of thinking, but at
the same time as they began developing it, Valve’s engineers began to untangle
a far knottier problem: how to build the gamepad of the future.
“We were
already doing some experiments on wearable computing and virtual reality,”
explains Greg, “but for the living room we needed an input device that was able
to play the whole Steam catalogue, without requiring somebody to bring a mouse
and keyboard onto the sofa. We realised we had to make the games think they’re
being played by those traditional devices, because there’s no way we can update
all those titles now – they were never built for a game controller, and you
can’t just crack a few thousand games open to magically support something new.”
A
powerful new category of living-room hardware is on the horizon.
If Valve was
going to trick every game in its 3000-plus catalogue into thinking they were
being played by traditional means, it would need to create a brand new input
device. And possibly quite a weird one.
“We built a
lot of prototypes that had a trackball on the right-hand side. We had small
trackballs, we tried cue ball-sized trackballs that punched all the way through
to the back of the controller so that the ball’s being held around its middle,
and you can hold the whole thing and have really precise input. That was great
– trackballs are actually really, really good in terms of 2D pointing – but it
also had some downsides. It’s asymmetrical, for one thing, so right-handed
only; different people liked different configurations, so it’s not a
one-size-fits-all solution; and a trackball has a lot of moving parts, which
means you’re going to get a lot of Cheeto dust stuck in there.” It’s good to
know that some companies take your snack crumbs into account.
We
have designed a high-performance prototype that’s optimized for gaming,
for the living room, and for Steam.
“So we
started trying trackpads. They were way behind trackballs for a long time, but
when we started changing the software we began to see its potential. For a
while, we even went off past trackpads and tried having touch input across a
whole flat surface. It was useful to try that, but it taught us that wasn’t
where we wanted to go – often we ended up needing to have a divided experience,
where you’re looking down at your hands and then up at the screen, and the
tactile feeling of a controller was absent.
The
tactile feeling of a controller was absent.
“It also
taught us how important haptic feedback is for any touch device. That channel
of information from the touch input device to the user’s hands is vital. It can
carry all kinds of information on what’s happening in the game, but on a
nuts-and-bolts level it tells you what part of the touch surface you’re using.
We subdivide those surfaces into slices, or concentric rings, and those
boundaries are impossible for the player to detect unless you have haptic
feedback.”
It was at
this point that the pieces of the puzzle came together. The problem was that
Valve wanted a trackball that wasn’t a trackball. The solution was to make
exactly that: a virtual trackball. “Once we started looking at haptic feedback,
we realised it could also help us hold onto the things we’d achieved with a
trackball. The electromagnets in there are so precise that they can emulate the
momentum in a physical ball. The user can feel that the ball is spinning fast,
or it’s slowing down, or it has stopped. So you can toss the virtual ball and
have it feel like it’s spinning under your thumb, then plant your thumb on it
and have it quickly come to rest again. And that channel of information makes
it easy to use. It makes you aware, even before you’re seeing the results on
screen that you’re speeding up, turning or stopping.”
