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Nintendo has filed a patent for ‘smart fluid’ joysticks, perhaps to eliminate drift | VGC
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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No, I read the whole thing, including that line, but that's entirely editorializing from the reporter. The quotes from the actual patent are pretty clear, machine translation word soup aside.
You being nitpicky made me go dig up the full patent, which makes it even clearer: "(...) The intensity of the magnetic field can be designated from the application. Thus, it is possible to perform flexible control in accordance with the application".
I don't blame the commenters for not going that extra step, though, that's just me being fastidious. I do blame the reporters focusing on stick drift because mah clicks for not reading the patent properly, though.
EDIT: For what it's worth, I find the idea of a stick being full of ferrofluid or whatever else they're using for this to be... likely finicky and potentially messy and fragile, depending on how much you need in there to make it work properly. This sounds intriguing and weirdly high-tech, but if you made me bet I wouldn't feel comfortable putting money on this showing up on a Switch 2 just yet. Could be wrong, though.
Reading your edit here.
I won't buy a Nintendo controller again until they're out for awhile and I know they're good.
The two I have are garbage and I didn't even get drift. The stick flick makes a lot of high precision games unplayable. And most of the time I use a third party controller that's better, more reliable, and half the price.
I mean, that's fair enough, I suppose. Like I said elsewhere I've had more problems with the PS5 controllers than the Switch ones, but my guess is this is luck of the draw. Some people just don't like the Joycon form factor, and that's also fair. I have some wrist issues and split controllers are amazing for my specific issues, so I'm very on board with the design for very specific reasons.
FWIW, I suspect a lot of the issues people report with those things are down to connectivity, not build quality. The BT antenna in those is terrible and it's being power starved to run on their tiny batteries. I've used literally hundreds of Joycon at one point or another and rarely seen legit stick drift, but I've had controllers where in a noisy environment just your hand grip could make the connection get all flaky. What the Switch does in that scenario seems to be to just hold your stick position and call it a day, which isn't great.
I found a comment about the accuracy of the reader combined with a factual difference from the article very ironic and should be elaborated, which you did. +1