The PS5’s Final Easter Egg has 40,000 PlayStation symbols that you can experience

When my colleague Rewandrew Webster reviewed the PlayStation 5, he explained how you can’t see Sony’s next pay generation of video games – you Touch. Part of it is how the astonishing dual sense controller’s clever motorized triggers and sharp precision vibrations can recreate the intrusive excitement of strutting on a sandy beach or towards a rain-Peter-Porter.

The second part: this 40,000 small PlayStation symbols You will feel when you choose the new gamepad of PS5. As an Easter egg for its fans, the company has decided to apply a microtexture to the entire lower shell of the dual sense controller, making it Sony’s most attractive gamepad, as thousands of small squares, triangles, circles and literally crosses at your fingertips.

Sony has not spoken about this before how We did, how many there are, or how many really big symbols are found, but we have the answers today – including the back photos and details of Sony’s Eugene Morisawa and Takeshi Igraashi, the main designers behind the PS5 and Dual Sense. Respectively (We’ve also borrowed a fancy industrial microscope so you can see how close the symbols look.)

You will probably see in the images at the top, above and below: these small symbols are stacked on top of each other, clumping in three dimensions. It’s not even a single, evenly-spaced layer, like the tiny dots you’ll remember from 2013 on Sony’s Dual Shock 4. They look messy, almost organic – which may be because the whole design was crafted by hand.

And not just a sketch. Morisawa, senior art director at Sony’s Design Center Product Design Group, explains that the various designs were hand-crafted, digitized, mocked, applied to real prototype gamepads, and re-examined until teams find the balance they want. Was. : Looks pleasant, has enough texture to stay comfortable and non-slip, but not so sandpaper-rough that it will hurt your hands during a long gaming session.

While designers could easily place the digital version of the design where they wanted in Sony’s CAD programs, Morisawa says the main thing is to compare and test physically different prototypes: “When it takes a long time to build a prototype, ‘go / no – He said ‘the verdict of a product is decided at the time you see it and touch it,’ ”he told us via email.

Finding the right height of the symbols was a lot of work in itself, as you can see in some of Sony’s behind-the-scenes photos. In the end, they settled on two layers – one about 15 microns tall, and the other 30 microns tall, according to the measurements we made with the Nikon LV 100 microscope.

Really applying symbols to a dual sense gamepad was an easy part – because it just doesn’t apply. Each of those 40,000 symbols is a part of the controller’s shell, created when molten ABS plastic beads are squeezed into small laser-cut crevices during a standard injection-molding process. The design has been optimized to keep the symbols intact since they came out of the mold.

The trick is to have the right devices to start that mold. To create such precise shapes on a perfectly three-dimensional curved surface that fits in the palm of your hand, lasers came in handy. In particular, Igrashi says a high-end, multi-axis laser engraving machine, “is hard to come by.” Upshot? Being part of that mold, the design you feel on the PS5’s controller is exactly what every other owner will do.

Sony’s PlayStation controller has defined gamepads for decades, so, not surprisingly, Google’s Stadia controller came with the same kind of sturped texture that Sony introduced in 2013 with Dual Shock 4. T just for your hands; Rarely are there PlayStation symbols part of the PS5 experience where you would think to look. You’ll find them on the inner lip, on both side panels of the PS5 console. They also decorate the grip of the PS5’s optional media remote, dual sense charging station, PS5 camera and Sony’s Pulse 3D wireless headset.

They also appear within at least one game: Astro’s room, Must play PS5p pack c-in, clearly use the composition on many floors and walls. It makes sense. Is just Astro Celebrating the company’s history in gaming, it’s full of PlayStation Easter eggs that entertain good-natured in Sony itself.

In the PS3 era, Sony has always felt arrogant, a little sure fans will stop offering anything – amb 599 console featuring proprietary discs and memory sticks for its ambitious portable, Smash Bros.. Game franchises to back up rivals without enough favorite video – but since PlayStation has not only received a load of goodwill, it has become more self-aware. If the company could stay that way during the PS5’s life cycle (and, you know, people really buy one), I highly doubt it would be a winner.