Housed at the end of a forgettable industrial street in Los Angeles, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design’s IDEAS campus isn’t much to look at from the outside. But inside, it is a maker’s dream. Half a dozen 3D printers are whirling away, producing plastic models in fantastic shapes: contorted buildings, double-helix-style chains, intricate snowflake-like patterns. Within the cavernous space, a group of students and professors are sprawled around an enormous conference table debating a CAD design projected on a huge screen. It feels like a top-secret skunkworks lab.

On another side of the hangar sits a giant robotic arm holding a projector that’s displaying a scene from a video game onto a large screen. Standing in front of the screen is a man in a hoodie and track pants who is playing "Street Fighter V" using an unfamiliar controller. The player is Darryl “Snake Eyez” Lewis , one of the world’s top gamers. And that funny controller he’s holding? It’s the result of more than a year of collaboration between him and an IDEAS team to likely make him even better.

Darryl 'Snake Eyez' Lewis's revolutionary control pad © RICK RODNEY

Lewis, 30, who burst onto the scene with a first-place finish in "Super Street Fighter II" at EVO 2010, is now considered one of the best " Street Fighter V " players around. Still, he thought the controller he was using — an Xbox 360 controller modded to work on a PlayStation 4 — was holding him back. It broke too often (and at $200 a mod, the money added up) and the buttons were oddly spaced for his needs. Shrewd players could read his moves by glancing at his hands. “I’ve often thought the only reason I liked playing with a specific controller,” he says, “is because I played on it a lot.”

That’s where the IDEAS program, an incubator for cross-disciplinary design research, came in. In the fall of 2017, Lewis teamed up with lecturer Marta Nowak and a group of students in her graduate technology seminar to see if they could design a better controller. (Red Bull’s Esports Performance program made the introduction in support of Lewis’s near- and long-term development as a player and entrepreneur.) The internal electronics, heavily regulated to prevent gamers from gaining an advantage, were off-limits. But with the external design, they could innovate and move beyond the standard one-size-fits-all controller to make something specifically tailored for Lewis and the fighting game in which he excels. “I would compare it to shoes used for sports,” says Nowak. “You go to the Nike store and there are hundreds of designs for different functions.”

The researchers attended tournaments to watch elite gamers play. They motion-captured Lewis’s movements while playing and attached sensors to the controller to map his touch and pressure points. They talked to Lewis about how he played. One early discovery was that Lewis’s controller was way too small for his hands and caused them to sweat. They also found he supported the controller with his left hand and readjusted with his right, which completely surprised Lewis, who had thought the exact opposite was true.

Darryl “Snake Eyez” Lewis's revolutionary control pad © Rick Rodney

The end result is an asymmetrical controller with a long-weighted left grip for holding and a short button stub on the right. Sloped ridges along the left side and above the buttons help Lewis orient his hands without looking and shield his fingers from his opponent’s eyes. The buttons are off-center (not perpendicular like current controllers) to better reflect a natural hand angle. Different kinds of textured bumps across the controller ease hand repositioning and reduce sweating by allowing airflow.

He’s been testing the controller for a few weeks now, asking for a few minor tweaks — a slightly different touch to the D-pad, shaving a few millimeters off the grip to make it more comfortable. Small things. He says he can already see the performance boost. The reduced sweating has increased his endurance, and the improved ergonomics produce less stress on the buttons, which should translate into greater durability. All of this means he thinks he’ll be able to play at a high level with more consistency and for longer stretches of time. “Confidence means a lot,” he says. “If I’m not having the problems, then I’m more confident.”