Xbox Adaptive Controller

The genesis of the Xbox Adaptive Controller goes back to 2014, when a Microsoft engineer was scrolling through Twitter and noticed a photo of a custom gaming controller made by Warfighter Engaged, a nonprofit organization that provides gaming devices to wounded vets.

The engineer, Matt Hite, reached out to the organization’s founder, Ken Jones, and learned how difficult it was for injured veterans — triple amputees, quadriplegics, vets with traumatic brain injuries — to access the world of gaming, and how time-consuming it was for Jones, a mechanical engineer who started the organization in 2012, to modify equipment for them.

There was a hackathon coming up at Microsoft’s 2015 Ability Summit, so a group of employees decided to put together a team with the goal of developing a solution for Warfighter Engaged. Working in consultation with Jones, the team developed a gaming device that used Kinect motion-sensing technology to track a gamer’s movements and translate them as if they were inputs from a traditional Xbox Wireless Controller.

The project was recognized by leadership at the hackathon and led a different employee team to create another device for Microsoft’s company-wide hackathon later that year, a unit that attached to an Xbox controller and allowed users who had difficulty navigating a traditional controller to plug in additional buttons and switches.

The device was further refined at Microsoft’s 2016 hackathon, and momentum for the project began building within the company.
The introduction of the Copilot feature in Xbox was instrumental in driving the shift from an adaptive device to standalone unit that acted as a hub. Disabled gamers would get greater flexibility, and the controller would be a more elegant solution than an unwieldy add-on with wires hanging off in various directions.

To design the controller, the project team turned to the experts, consulting with gamers, accessibility advocates and nonprofits that work with disabled gamers. The Designed for Xbox team engaged partners like LogitechG and PDP, to optimize their devices to work with the Xbox Adaptive Controller. The team cultivated new relationships, like with Quadstick, to bring entirely new devices types to Xbox.

“We’re not trying to design for all of us, we’re trying to design for each of us,” said Bryce Johnson, a senior inclusivity designer on Microsoft’s Xbox team. “If we design for people who have a unique need, it benefits people universally.”

The V&A, the world’s leading museum of art, design and performance, has acquired the Xbox Adaptive Controller for its Rapid Response Collecting display. The area was opened in 2014 and explores how current global events, political changes and pop cultural phenomena impact, or are influenced by, design, art, architecture and technology.