Gallery: See the Dramatic Evolution of Valve's Steam Controller
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BELLEVUE, Washington -- If you want to see how Valve created its innovative new Steam Controller for PC gaming, it all starts here: with something that looks like a bar of soap. In late October, WIRED was invited to the offices of Valve Corporation in Bellevue, outside of Seattle, for a hands-on preview of the company's plan to bring its Steam PC gaming service into the living room. It's already unveiled Big Picture, a Steam interface built for the TV. Later this year, it will beta test Steam Machines, PC gaming hardware in a living-room form factor. And to control it all, Valve has come up with the Steam Controller, which lets players control games that were meant to use a keyboard and mouse setup from the comfort of their couch, using high-resolution touch pads. Valve product designer Greg Coomer walked us through the evolution of the controller, showing us numerous prototypes that the company cooked up over the past two years and explaining how each one led it a little bit closer to the final design. Here's what we saw. __Above__: This early mockup was a first stab at the question of how to control a game that might require a 120-button keyboard in the living room: "What if we put buttons under all of your fingers?" said Coomer. While this particular form factor -- individual buttons for each finger -- didn't last, the final controller does have "back paddle" buttons that you press in this manner.
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Many of the controller prototype iterations, laid out in rough chronological order from left to right. One controller, shown at upper left, was a break-apart motion controller. The left side was attached by magnets and could break off from the unit to function as a Wii Remote-type of one-handed motion controller. "This was very functional, not just for looking at," said Coomer. "Hopefully that's obvious, that this thing was wired to work and that we did a bunch of gameplay testing around all of these devices."
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One controller concept that Valve stuck with for a long time was the idea of having a trackball on the right side of the controller, to substitute for a mouse pointer.
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As Valve continued to prototype the trackball controllers, the ball got larger and larger and larger: "We found that the larger physical ball was a huge win," said Coomer. Eventually they ended up with one that was so large it actually went all the way through the controller and could be spun with your ring and pinky fingers. "Having two fingers lets you do quick stops, it lets you pick up your thumb, put it somewhere else while you're still moving the ball around with your finger, or vice versa, because there are buttons back here," Coomer said.
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A 3-D printed prototype. Valve has many 3-D printers in its office and produced mockups like this on a regular basis, Coomer said.
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Eventually, Valve decided to use trackpads to emulate a trackball. This would give developers more freedom in terms of how they used the inputs, Coomer said. "When you start simulating physical devices like thumbsticks or like trackballs, and include things like momentum so you can flick the ball and it'll spin in a virtual way, then it becomes really powerful," said Coomer. "Especially when you consider how many titles there are on Steam and how many different kinds of input they require."
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Early attempts at trackpad controllers, Coomer said, showed some of the flaws of the setup. If the trackpads and controllers were flat-shaped, your thumbs would hit almost the entire trackpad at once, as he demonstrated here. This made it very difficult for a computer to reliably tell where you were trying to point.
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A near-final (but not quite) version of the Steam Controller. The trackpads are bent inwards and the handles curve up so that only the dead centers of your thumbs make contact with the pads, leading to greater accuracy.
