Deep Dive Look at Haptic Feedback of Astro’s Playroom

haptic feedback

When Sony first announced the PS5 and its controller, I was a bit skeptical. While I knew the console would provide a power boost over last-gen, the controller itself had me worried. Known as the DualSense, Sony claimed that the controller would “heighten” the feeling of immersion through its newly developed form of haptic feedback, and adaptive triggers. It had me excited, but at that time, I wasn’t entirely confident that we would actually see developers make use of it, turning it yet into another “gimmick” that would show up in a game every so often.

How very wrong I was, and in the year and a half time since the release of the PS5, I’m still finding myself amazed by the creativity of developers when it comes to using the haptics, and adaptive triggers of the PS5. Now, I’ve talked about those features in many of my past reviews, but to talk is a bit of a hard thing to convey to readers, so after doing a bit of some research, I’ve come up with a solution to demonstrate exactly how developers are making use of the DualSenses’ haptic feedback. To kick off what is hopefully a long series of deep dives, I wanted to go back to the very start and look back at a title specifically developed to show gamers just how immersive the DualSense controller can make gaming. I’m talking about Team ASOBI’s (formerly Japan Studio) Astro’s Playroom.  

Sound Is All About Vibrations

I can’t provide you with the feeling of touch produced from the DualSenses’ haptic feedback. For that you would need to actually have the controller at hand, and try out the many titles that support it. However, in case you didn’t learn this from elementary science class, every single sound that you have ever heard in your life is produced by vibration. Sound is the result of air molecules colliding into one another to vibrate, thus producing something audible to the ears. When someone walks, you can hear their footsteps. When you run water, you can hear the flow of the stream. When a car drives by, you can hear the engine going, and even sometimes feel that vibration from the sound if it’s loud and/or close enough. Sound is vibration, and every sound you hear is a result of a vibration.

That same can be said about the DualSense, where as traditional rumbling used weighted motors that only really functioned by on/off, the DualSense uses what are called Linear Resonant Actuator as explained by the experts at Actronika:

It is a Linear Resonant Actuator, or Voice Coil Motor, as its behavior implies the linear motion of magnets driven by coils and suspended by elastic parts, like springs or silicone membranes. Such construction induces a resonant component. A HD Haptic actuator looks like a small speaker with a mechanical design aimed to provide a high acceleration at low frequencies. Modern designs like the one Foster provides, or our HapCoil actuators, have the capability to also reproduce a part of the audible bandwidth.

This allows developers to precisely tweak those motors and the way they vibrate, resulting at times, unique sound cues. And well, if you can feel what you can hear, you can probably understand why that would make a game feel more immersive. 

This brings us to Astro’s Playroom — ASOBI’s and PlayStation’s showcase of what the DualSense controller is fully capable of. Like I mentioned before, I did a bit of research on this, and while there are many videos of people showing off the audio produced from the haptics, I wanted to take things a bit further and record those sounds directly rather than through a camera or directional mic. Finding some cheap contact, or otherwise known as piezo microphones (mics designed to capture vibrations), I taped a pair to where I believed the actuators were felt the most and created this Frankenstein set-up. 

Yeah, it’s ugly, but it worked (sort of), because when I had to actually use the controller there was some unwanted noise being picked up, such as button presses, joystick movement, and other non-haptic related outputs which unfortunately can be heard in our audio capture. It’s not the cleanest of audio like I wanted, but luckily I did discover a solution (and a better set-up without the ugly tape) that has since been applied to capturing haptic audio in other titles. Sadly, it isn’t featured in this episode due to finding that solution afterwards. So, for now you’ll just have to bear with us on this first episode, though it still does the intended job of showcasing all the different sounds produced by the haptic feedback. 

Astro’s Playroom Haptic Feedback Showcase

It’s actually impressive in retrospect to see what ASOBI achieved in their utilization of the DualSense when looking back at Astro’s Playroom. While I certainly remember feeling those different haptic vibrations, a large number of those I never knew had a unique sound. It’s surprising, and for me, this has has given me a new level of appreciation for both Playroom and the DualSense controller. I’m hoping it did the same for you, and if you did like what you see, or huh, hear, then perhaps you may want us to dive into other titles in the future? If so, let us know in the comments below if there is a title that you may want us to look at, though as a short tease, I will say that I did prep another episode centered around an iconic PlayStation duo. 

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