novint falcon - latest news, information, videos, photos, images

From Wikipedia: 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.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.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. See more...