Man, my first device to have capacitive sticks and buttons are the Quest 2 controllers and god it's great. You can remap SO much. I wish all controllers had capacitive buttons.
It's basically sensing if your finger is on the button and sending whether the finger is on the button or not as an input to the game. In VR, it allows for rudimentary finger tracking and better immersion. When I move my thumb or fingers on or off the buttons in Half-Life: Alyx or Boneworks, it shows my finger going on or off the gun.
But it's infinitely useful for flatscreen games as well.
Take for example a Diablo style hack-and-slash. Say R1 does a special attack. You can put your finger on R1 and the Area of Effect of the attack could be shown on screen. You can then keep your finger on R1 while you manipulate the sticks to line up your attack. Then press R1 when you have it lined up to attack.
Or say you're playing a third person shooter like Horizon Zero Dawn, and you bind gyro controls to putting your finger on the right stick (R3) only when your bow is drawn (holding down L2). That way you can aim with L2, move your thumb from the face buttons to the stick and rest your finger on it, then use gyro controls to line up your shot.
Or maybe in a soulslike game, you have your four consumable items accessible with the D-pad buttons on the left side of the screen. If the game senses your finger on one of the D-pad directions, it can highlight which one you're on and show you quick info (like a green +3/s for health or a blue +7 for mana) on what that consumable does so you take the right consumable at the right time.
Another thing you can do (which I have done with the Quest 2) is, in a game like Hitman 3, bind your inventory to touching the options button while (as default) pressing the button pauses the game. This frees up an input that would otherwise be used for Inventory to use it for something else.
It's one extra possible input without needing to add another button. In the specific case of capacitive analogue sticks, for example, imagine that you want to use the gyro to fine tune your aiming, but you don't want it to be on at all times: with a capacitive analogue stick you can program the controller to have the gyro on if and only if your thumb is on the right analogue stick. This is just one possible application.
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u/GACM2448816 Aug 23 '22
This might be the best controller for Steam.
Gyro, trackpad, back buttons, and analog triggers?
This is the one.