Sony is still developing concepts which could see controllers improve even more, and Sony's latest patent describes a new kind of analog stick which is able to retract into the body of the controller. There are also plans to include a non-Newtonian fluid which would be displaced by the collapsible analog stick. A non-Newtonian fluid is a liquid which hardens in response to sudden pressure, and this should provide these analog sticks with a kind of inbuilt haptic resistance similar to the DualSense's triggers. The fluid in the stick would also likely help to reset the analog stick fairly quickly once the player lifts pressure from them.
This is an interesting design choice which could introduce a range of new gameplay features for developers to implement. These collapsible control sticks could act like two extra analog trigger inputs on the face of the controller, with which the player could maintain fine control of the game's analog inputs. Camera controls for 3D games are almost universally mapped to the right analog stick, and an extra dimension to move this stick in could allow players to easily zoom or focus the camera on a specific element of the environment.
Implementing collapsible control sticks would be more than a design tweak for the DualSense controller, as it already features buttons which are pressed by pushing on the controller's analog sticks, although these buttons are usually only utilized when a game runs out of face buttons to map its controls to, and even then, nothing vital is ever usually mapped to an analog stick button. If this design is implemented into a future version of the DualSense controller it may not play well with older games which have inputs that are dependent on the fast click of an analog stick, such as the jump button in Dark Souls 2.
