Sony has stricken a deal with Immersion Corp to use their haptic technology in the future.

Hold on – Immersion and Sony? They have a not so rosy past, and we’ve used some light words to define their relationship there! In 2002, Immersion has sued Sony and Microsoft, as they believed they have infringed their patents when the companies used vibration functions in their respective controllers. The lawsuit has been going for five years, and it ended in 2007 with Sony paying 97 million dollars. A dozen years later, we now read the following on Twitter: „Sony has signed a deal with Immersion Corp to develop haptics technology for gaming controllers and VR controllers, allowing players to feel sensations of pushing, pulling, grasping, and pulsing in games.” So the two companies have seemingly no more bad blood between them, and they work officially together, which could benefit both the next-gen PlayStation, as well as the new PlayStation VR model.

The DualShock technology surfaced in the late 90s on the first PlayStation – for example, via the vibration, we knew in the first Silent Hill how much health did Harry Mason, the protagonist, have, as the vibration acted as his heartbeat. Since then, the technology has massively improved, and not only regular controllers use the haptic technology, but the VR devices also have a dip at it.

We don’t know how Immersion’s advanced haptic technology will be used in the DualShock 5 (how else would Sony call the controller? honest question – and we don’t even dare to think about how it could look!), and we also don’t know how the new PlayStation VR model would use Immersion’s tech, but going with the nomen est omen, we can safely say that in virtual reality, we will have much more immersive experiences.

We can now safely say that Sony is preparing with VR as well.

Source: MP1st