Novint Technologies
Novint Technologies, Inc. was an Albuquerque, New Mexico, company that designed and built haptic devices and software.
As the user moves the grip in three dimensions (right-left and forwards-backwards, like a mouse, but also up-down, unlike a mouse), the Falcon's software keeps track of where the grip is moved and creates forces that a user can feel, by sending currents to the motors in the device.
The Falcon's sensors can keep track of the handle's position to sub-millimeter resolution, and the motors are updated 1000 times per second (1 kHz), giving a realistic sense of touch.
The actions and interactions of a character in a game can be felt, such as the feel of a recoil of a gun, the motion of a golf club, or the accelerations of a car.
It consists of its grip connected via three arms to a roughly conical body, which sits on a U-shaped base.
Currents are sent to the motors at the 1 kHz servo rate to present the user with an accurate sense of touch.
It was intended for use in First Person Shooter (FPS) games, but is generally an ergonomic grip that can be used for many applications.
It has developed a low level driver software called HDAL, which stands for Haptic Device Abstraction Layer.
The Falcon is packaged with 3 applications; a tutorial, a game called Newton's Monkey Business, and the Feelin It Sports Pack.
The tutorial also shows the feeling of dynamics through a ball attached to a rubber band which can be swung around, and a simulation of catching a baseball with a catcher's mitt.
F-Gen was developed to create a larger number of supported games and applications for the Novint Falcon with the understanding that the control and forces for many interactions in games/apps could be implemented without source code access.
Users can adjust the movement scales for the Falcon's control, and save settings for various games.
Given this vision, Novint was originally focused on consumer applications, but quickly found itself in a situation where the dot com bubble was bursting and the markets were collapsing.
Investments in 2001 were difficult to come by for an early stage company, so Novint focused its efforts on higher end professional applications.
Novint spent several years focusing on custom development for a variety of companies including Lockheed Martin, Chrysler, Chevron, Mobil, Aramco, Sandia National Laboratories, and Harvard University, among others.
At that point in time, Novint had a strong hardware solution, but felt that it needed better game support, which was one of the main focuses of the company.
[2] In December 2009, Novint launched the first beta version of F-Gen, a tool which allowed mouse-like use of the Falcon in Windows.
The program also included a scripting functionality that theoretically allowed users to integrate the Falcon into practically any game.
In February 2010, Novint launched their second beta version of their F-Gen software, integrating their proprietary G-cube functionality.
