For the longest time, potentiometers were the default tech for controller analogue sticks. More recently, the issue of stick drift has become more prominent, leading to non-contact magnetic tech like Hall Effect and Tunneling Magnetoresistance (TMR) sticks proliferating. That said, the boom of such tech happened in the middle of the console generation, so you’d only be able to find them in third-party controllers. But with a recent patent, it looks like Sony is at least considering it, if not for the DualSense, then for the controller of the PS6.
While the figures within the Sony patent depict a controller that looks identical to a DualSense, the most important parts mention the use of either a Magnetic Resistance Sensor, or ‘Tunneling Magneto Resistance”. There’s also the mention of the sticks operating “in a non-contact manner”, but that’s a given for magnetic tech anyway. Either way, it would be a massive improvement over the conventional contact-based potentiometer, at maybe a slight battery life cost.
For right now, though, as mentioned, the only way to get a PS5 controller with TMR sticks is to use third party ones, such as the Razer Raiju V3 Pro. While the option is there, despite its licensed nature, you’re strangely locked out of first-party features like haptic feedback, and even adaptive triggers. So while your sticks do last longer, you do give up a lot of the immersion that those features will otherwise provide.
Of course, as is the nature of patents, there is no guarantee that Sony will be making and releasing a controller with TMR sticks. It would be nice if these showed up as part of newer DualSense controllers, considering the images in the patent. That being said, if you could mod the swappable sticks on the DualSense Edge to make use of TMR tech rather than its default potentiometers, that may just be the perfect PlayStation-style controller overall.
(Source: WIPO)
