By: Yumi Ueda, Hardware Engineer II
Chenghui Liu, Hardware Engineer I
Toshiyuki Ando, Hardware Engineer II
Yoichi Nishimaki, Manager, Research Engineering
Yusuke Watanabe, Staff Software Researcher
Noriyuki Fukushima, Sr Hardware Engineer
Shinichi Hirata, Principal Hardware Researcher
Hitoshi Nakamura, Sr Hardware Engineer

Hideki Mori, Sr Manager, Research Engineering

This work was performed for research purposes only.

It would be amazing to make the controller into any shape we want, like a fishing rod, for example, and use it as we desire!

If we can freely use what we have created in the real world in the virtual world, we can unleash users’ imagination!

That thought led us to the idea of a modular controller that could be divided into blocks and then assembled by the user.

However, arranging and assembling modules with various functions to suit the application can require some experience and familiarity.

So, we proposed a method to make it easy for beginners to assemble the modules by guiding them through the application on what to do and how to align the modules.

This controller consists of seven input/output modules, such as sticks and buttons, and is equipped with full-color LEDs at each vertex.

The lighting patterns of these LEDs provide assembly guidance on which blocks to use, which surfaces to connect, and in which orientation.

In addition, we created a game application that progresses through the assembly of the controller and developed a system that allows the user to follow the instructions to assemble them into the proper shape.

For more details, please refer to the following page:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3681755.3688946