This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

University of Utah mechanical engineering professor William Provancher would play video games to relax and take his mind off of work. Instead, all of that thumb-twitching game playing gave him a potentially multimillion-dollar idea.

The associate professor and three of his engineering students have devised a video game controller that not only rumbles when you play, but also has thumb-sized joysticks that stretch, push and pull your thumbs to simulate force feedback. With it, you can feel the sensation of a fishing line tugging or the direction and impact of a nearby explosion.

The professor and his students are demonstrating their new technology this week at the Haptics Symposium in Vancouver, a conference dedicated to the physical feedback between computers and human operators. Provancher hopes to have the technology implemented in the next generation of game consoles expected to debut in the next few years.

"As a researcher you're always trying to get it [the technology] out into the real world," Provancher said from Vancouver. "If a thousand people read my paper, that's great. But it's better if a hundred thousand use your technology in a product."

Basic force feedback was first introduced in a home gaming console with the "rumble pak" for the Nintendo 64 in 1997. Since then, gaming consoles including today's PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have built-in basic rumble in their controllers.

"What you're trying to do as a game designer is increase the person's immersion," said John Blackburn, co-founder of Salt Lake City-based game developer Avalanche Software, which makes video games for Disney. "When you can incorporate other senses besides sight and sound, it adds to that immersion."

On first view, Provancher's controller looks like an Xbox 360 gamepad with two thumbsticks and two rows of buttons. But what's different are additional motors inside the controller that move the tiny joysticks independently. So if you play a military shooting game, the thumbsticks can simulate the player crawling along the ground in a prone position. Or if you fire a gun, it simulates the recoil.

Computer science doctoral student Ashley Guinan, 23, who worked on the controller and loves playing the video game "NCAA Football," says their controller can give physical cues to the player — for example, when a defensive lineman is about to sack the quarterback.

"Hopefully we'll see this in some sort of gaming system down the line," she said. "It will improve gaming and make the experience that much better for the user."

Provancher had been working on this form of haptic feedback for a few years, thinking he could apply it to mobile devices for navigation or for a portable MP3 player to get physical feedback whenever you're scrolling through a list of songs. Then he realized he could further the development of video game controllers when he started playing shooting games like "Call of Duty."

"I was getting to a point where I needed to blow off some steam, so I started playing video games," he said. "It was tough for me — a 38-year-old at the time — to play video games, so I thought touch feedback could help me."

vince@sltrib.com

Google+: +Vincent Horiuchi