Novint Technologies, Inc. is a corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, that designs and builds haptic devices. After several years of designing custom devices for a variety of companies including Lockheed Martin, Chrysler, Chevron, Mobil, Aramco, and Harvard University, Novint released the Novint Falcon -- a mass-market haptic device -- in 2006.
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Novint Falcon
Novint's flagship mass-market product is the Novint Falcon, a USB haptic device designed to replace the mouse in video games and other applications. The Falcon consists of a ping pong ball-sized spherical grip, connected via three arms to a roughly conical housing, which sits on a weighted base. The housing contains sensors and motors attached to each arm; via triangulation, the sensors can determine where the grip is in three-dimensional space via the arms, and the motors can translate the grip in three-dimensional space via a cable-drive mechanism in order to provide haptic feedback to the user. The grip also has a cluster of four buttons on top of it, and can be easily removed and replaced with other grips, such as a pistol-shaped grip for first person shooters. Currently, none of the available grips are capable of rotating or providing additional actuated feedback. At the flattened point of the Falcon's conical housing is a Novint Falcon logo that lights up in different colors to indicate the state of the device.
Novint Falcon Software & Mods
The Falcon is packaged with a disk called Newton's Monkey Business which contains a demonstration program, among other things, presents a variety of textures to interact with using the Falcon. For instance, choosing an ice texture presents a hard, slippery surface to interact with, and selecting molasses presents a viscous, liquid texture with a grainy interior. The tutorial of the falcon explains the basic usage of the falcon controller by video and after the video by an interactive demo.
Also available as a free download for the Falcon is Haptics Life 2, a Half-Life 2 mod in which the mouse controls have been replaced with Falcon controls. As a result, the weight of carried objects and damage dealt to the player's character are conveyed by the controller to the player, and each gun in the game has a different, tangible recoil. Haptics-Life 2: Episode 1 is also available as a mod for Half-Life 2: Episode 1.
As of June 23, 2009, Valve have released updates to Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 adding compatibility with the Novint Falcon.[1]
Mods adding Falcon support are available for download, for other games, including:
Drivers for these mods can be found in the Games section of Novint's official site [[1]].
Upcoming Titles
The following games have been updated, or will soon be updated with official Falcon support:
Ascension Reborn (Based on Advent Rising)
Battlefield 2
Battlefield 2142
Battlestations: Midway
Conflict: Vietnam
Counter-Strike: Source
Day of Defeat: Source
Gothic 3
Half-Life 2
Hitman: Blood Money
Left 4 Dead
Madden NFL 08
Mass Effect
NBA Live 08
Need for Speed: Pro Street
Painkiller: Overdose
Project Snowblind
Team Fortress 2
The Ship (video game)
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08
Release schedule estimates for the majority of these games are available at Novint's official site [2]
External links
References
- ^ Valve Releases Novint Falcon Support For Some Of The Best Rated Games Of All Time published on Steam news, 2009-06-23
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