They’re our new overlords
Ever wonder how controllers are made? Valve has put out a fascinating behind-the-scenes video showing the hard-working Aperture robots (yes, really!) that assemble Steam Controllers.
It lacks the minutia of something like How It’s Made — which I totally get; the Internet is an impatient place — but there is an additional nugget of insight for those of us who would like to know more:
“To achieve our goal of a flexible controller, we felt it was important to have a similar amount of flexibility in our manufacturing process, and that meant looking into automated assembly lines,” writes Valve. “It turns out that most consumer hardware of this kind still has humans involved in stages throughout manufacturing, but we kind of went overboard, and built one of the largest fully automated assembly lines in the US.”
“We aren’t crazy though, so humans are still on hand to keep the robots from becoming sentient.”
