MANILA, Philippines – The next PlayStation, the PlayStation 5, arrives in holiday 2020, Sony announced on their blog on Tuesday, October 8.

Sony confirmed that the next-generation console will be called the PlayStation 5 after some speculation that Sony may be going with a different name.

The author of the blog post, Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan, highlighted the upcoming console’s controller. He said they want to deepen the feeling of immersion and they want to do that by reimagining “how the sense of touch can add to that immersion.” 

Ryan said they’re adding two key innovations: haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. Haptic feedback lets the user feel certain vibrations that may indicate a response from the device. Some devices such as a laptop trackpad or a smartphone with haptic feedback vibrate when pressed, giving the illusion of having pressed a real button.

Sony appears to be developing the technology further, promising a “broader range of feedback” that would let users feel a variety of textures, a car crash in a racing game, or a tackle in football. It appears to be a more sophisticated version of controller rumble technology, which has been around since the first PlayStation. 

Adaptive triggers, on the other hand, allow the L2 and R2 shoulder buttons to provide resistance in certain situations. Ryan explains, “Developers can program the resistance of the triggers so that you feel the tactile sensation of drawing a bow and arrow or accelerating an off-road vehicle through rocky terrain.”

“In combination with the haptics, this can produce a powerful experience that better simulates various actions. Game creators have started to receive early versions of the new controller, and we can’t wait to see where their imagination goes with these new features at their disposal,” Ryan finished. 

Peter Rubin of Wired has had some hands-on time with a version of the PlayStation 5, giving us a teaser of how the new controller is shaping up:

“In the most impressive [demo], I ran a character through a platform level featuring a number of different surfaces, all of which gave distinct – and surprisingly immersive – tactile experiences. Sand felt slow and sloggy; mud felt slow and soggy. On ice, a high-frequency response made the thumbsticks really feel like my character was gliding. Jumping into a pool, I got a sense of the resistance of the water; on a wooden bridge, a bouncy sensation.”

Rubin also noted that the new controller looks “an awful lot like the PS4’s DualShock 4” in a matte black color. It will charge through a USB-C port. 

As revealed before, the console will have an ultra fast-loading solid-state drive, which one developer said may eliminate loading times as if we were back in the no-loading-time cartridge days.

It will also have a GPU that’s capable of ray-tracing – a new, bleeding-edge graphics technology that allows for hyperrealistic lighting. Mark Cerny, the new console’s system architect, confirms to Wired that the PlayStation 5’s ray-tracing ability is hardware-based and not a software fix, which some had believed. 

A redesigned user interface is also in the works for the new console. – Rappler.com