At this point, it’s fair to say that I’ve built at least some of my career on the back of a single trick: Haptics Rerouting, or more appropriately, Rumble Rerouting. This involves taking a video game on PC or Console, catching specific game state or else rumble signals from the game to the gamepad, and pointing them at other things.
Rumble rerouting has become popular on TikTok/Twitch/Youtube/etc too, with people hooking up all sorts of large haptics to desks and basically liquefying furniture (or themselves) with games.
However, in my case, the other things are usually sex toys.
Some examples of my projects include:
- SeXBox Xbox Rumble Controller Hardware Mod (2005)
- Rez Trancevibrator/Rez Infinite Rework (2018)
- Animal Crossing Rumble Rerouting (2020)
- Elden Ring Rumble Rerouting (2022)
These projects are built on more general platforms:
While these projects are fun to post to social media and show off at conferences, I’ve never really written up the technical background of what this requires. With the Elden Ring project done and dusted I figured now’s the time to put together an overview of how these various stunt hacks have come together, including where they sit in the technology stack, how they access the parts of a game or the surrounding system that they need to do what it is they do, and the impact they’ve had around making for good shitposts.
Continue reading “Haptics Rerouting for Fun and No Profit”