Imagine a games console that senses you aren't getting pumped up enough by a game, and so increases the intensity until it quite literally gets your juices flowing. The PS4 could have been that console.

Lead system architect Mark Cerny has revealed that, during the DualShock 4's development, Sony trialled gamepads capable of measuring players' galvanic skin response. It's a measure of how conductive your skin is at any given time, which varies based on how much you're sweating. When you're stressed, you sweat more, and that's why galvanic skin response is often used in lie-detecting polygraph tests.

"We had a long research project where we looked at pretty much any idea we could think of," says Cerny, in an exclusive conversation with Stuff. "Would it help to measure the galvanic response of the skin? We tried out a tremendous number of things - and then we went to the game teams to ask them what they thought they could use from the controller."