A video game controller with skin stretch haptic feedback

This paper presents the design of a game controller with integrated skin stretch feedback, a new form of touch feedback. This form of feedback can be used to provide directional information, as well as tactile gaming effects to a user through the input thumb joysticks. Prior testing has shown that a user can perceive and respond to single direction cues given through skin stretch feedback at the thumb joysticks. This paper presents further experiments to characterize user interaction and responses to feedback as a function of the relative timing between skin stretch cues given on both of the controller's thumb joysticks.