Microsoft downplays rumble loss in Kinect

In a bid to defend the lack of rumble in Microsoft’s upcoming motion controller, Kinect, a senior exec at the company has decided to undermine the value of haptic feedback.

Kudo Tsunoda, Microsoft Game Studios’ oft-tracksuited general manager, told Edge that “the overwhelming thing we’ve discovered is that rumble is such a rudimentary form of haptic feedback”.

Tsunoda said it was “almost laughable” that the industry considers rumble as the “holy grail” of haptic feedback.

He said, “It’s not like a little rumble in your palm is your whole way of interacting with the world – it’s not like, ‘oh, I stubbed my toe and I get a little rumble in my palm’.”

“We’ve gone so far past anything that can be done with rumble, or that kind of restrictive thing you have to hold. It’s been creatively liberating to work on this stuff.”

The imaginative passage is reminiscent of excuses previously used by former Sony WWS boss Phil Harrison, who in 2007 said ‘rumble is a last-generation technology’ when pressed on why the PS3 pads didn’t feature it.

After settling a lawsuit with haptics developer Immersion, Sony was free to release a rumble-enabled PS3 pad.