Dell’s Working On a Controller for PC Gaming in the Living Room

Valve’s {hardware} desires are presently doing higher than ever because of the Steam Deck, however as soon as upon a time, the home of Newell additionally needed to personal your front room. The Steam Machine, the bodily Steam Link, and even the Steam Controller by no means fairly took off like the Steam Deck has, however as cloud gaming has develop into extra normalized, different firms are coming in to hold on Valve’s desires. We noticed Dell’s Concept Nyx ultimately yr’s CES, the place it was revealed as an experimental, not-for-sale residence gaming server that basically works like a private GeForce Now to beam your video games throughout your private home. This yr, Concept Nyx is again, and whereas it’s nonetheless not for sale and the mechanics of the server haven’t modified a lot, Dell gave us a while with a new, additionally experimental and not-for-sale controller it’s testing to accompany it. Already, it’s wanting prefer it may develop into considered one of the most complete and comfy methods to regulate a PC out of your sofa.

The Steam Controller made waves when it got here out because of its twin haptic touchpads, a word that Dell is taking to coronary heart with its new idea controller. It’s acquired the similar four-button, two-stick structure you’re most likely accustomed to by now, and even boasts the similar again paddles you’ll get on premium controllers like the Dualsense Edge. But in place of the directional pad is a single haptic touchpad that’s imagined to boast fairly a little bit of performance.

Essentially, it’s there to offer you a radial menu. With the press of a button, the touchpad turns into a approach to navigate a fast entry menu of 8 or so PC settings (it’s customizable). Which PC settings the radial menu accesses is as much as you, and the thought is to allow you to set these in software program.

In addition to the touchpad—there are touchpads on Sony’s controllers, in any case—the Concept Nyx controller additionally has two scroll wheels, which operate identical to these in your mouse, positioned under the sticks. Dell’s additionally toying with a fingerprint sensor for fast log-ins, and the again paddles can be utilized as shift buttons to quickly swap the controller to new mapping schemes, which you’ll decide in the software program.

Perhaps the most spectacular a part of the controller is the shoulder buttons, which have haptic contact suggestions that additionally enable them to work in a comparable approach to a scroll wheel. You simply must brush your finger throughout them.

Still in the works are even more advanced features, like the ability to set custom resistances for your thumb sticks. The controller’s also supposed to have adaptive triggers much like Sony’s Dualsense, where it will offer different levels of force for different in-game activities, although I didn’t get to test this. The controller’s also supposed to recognize you and launch you right back into whatever game you were last playing when you pick it up—perhaps via the fingerprint reader—but I couldn’t test this either.

All of this is, of course, still a concept, but the ideation here is promising, especially for people who like to play games like MMOs with a controller, or who hate navigating a living room PC with a wireless keyboard and mouse. I would count myself among both of those groups. I didn’t get a chance to play any games with the Concept Nyx controller at a demo set up by Dell where I got to hold it, but I was impressed by the solid build quality. The haptics, scroll wheels, and scrolling shoulder buttons were also already working as intended when I demo’d them, and it was easy to differentiate between a new virtual notch whenever I brushed my hand across the shoulder button.

We’ll see if you’ll ever be able to actually buy this controller. As shown by Concept UFO, Dell’s ideas usually don’t go away that part. But the gauntlet is now thrown at everybody who thought the controller kind issue was already excellent.