Now that motion controls are on the way out and 3D video game viewing is kind of a bust, every console developer is looking to a brand new gimmick. The Xbox One’s was almost Smellovision. Seriously! This isn’t a joke. According to Xbox General Manager for Accessories Zulfi Alam (when he spoke to Venturebeat ), the Xbox One originally featured “small slugs of different types of smells that could actually come out of a controller.” This would, for example, allow you to smell flowers or trees as you walked through a jungle or smell char when you leap into a burning building.
Controller creation is a much weirder process than you probably think. Microsoft spent over 100 million dollars alone just developing the Xbox One controller. Several millions of that money were spent just making sure that the face buttons on the controller look the way they do. In fact, an incredible amount of this money was spent on aesthetics alone.
Other concepts that did not get used with the Xbox One controller included mini-displays, touch pads, and projectors. However, in the end, Microsoft decided that the Xbox 360 controller design was good enough to serve as a base, so most of the controller’s changes are aesthetic at most.
Source: Venturebeat