[laeus]

I got a chance to try this out with a first-person shooter. I was not very happy with it. It felt worse than mouse+keyboard and simultaneously worse than dual-analog gamepads. Everybody in the room had issues calibrating and re-centering themselves. I'm sure it gets better with more use, but that's just the problem: it fails a fundamental usability test, because the initial experience of using it is pretty awful and requires a significant learning curve to achieve results that aren't necessarily or obviously better than either of the current standards.

[vacri]

My first impression on viewing the controller is that reporting the 'location' of the thumb is going to be hard. Unlike a joystick or mouse that has a well-defined point, the thumb touches over a large area. You can find the centroid of this area - and the area will change size and shape as the thumb is rolled around. Different people will roll their thumbs differently, and there may be a mismatch between intent and physical interaction.

It'll be interesting to see how well they manage to deal with this.

[PhasmaFelis]

I suspect that will be a feature, not a bug. I already use finger-rolling on my laptop trackpad when I need pixel-level precision. For noobs, the difference probably won't be noticeable; for experts, I expect they'll be using that technique on purpose.

[Pxtl]

To be fair, dual-stick FPS gaming and mouse+keyboard gaming has a vicious learning-curve the first time out as well. The question is whether it's worth struggling through that.

[nslamberth]

Out of curiosity, was the haptic tech in the build you tried out?

Keeping thumbs oriented seems to be the biggest challenge of a controller like this, but I as hoping the haptic feedback would help keep your thumbs in place.