A while ago I posted about how Novint, an innovative and ambitious peripheral company took their freaky-deaky Falcon controller straight to EA instead of standing around like some kind of techno-wallflower. Well, it worked out pretty well and they’re leveraging it into more deals: they’re teaming up with Valve to add Falcon support to a ton of their games.
As befitting my skeptical nature, I’m withholding judgment until I get my hands on one, but to be honest if it’s good enough for Gabe Newell it’s probably good enough for me. Valve has seen fit to add support for the Falcon to the entire Orange Box, probably the best set of games for $40 in history. Of course, if you buy it bundled with the Falcon, the price goes up by about $200, so it’s not as much of a bargain, but this thing may just be a representative from the future of controllers.
I got to try this out at the Digital Life conference, and it was pretty neat. Full x-y-z axis control, with force-feedback. They had a demo with a little slingshot game, where you pull it back and let go which felt very realistic. A texture demo also worked well, where you could “feel” the sandpaper texture of a virtual object.
In spite of this, I’m having a hard time imagining how this would replace the mouse in a first-person shooter. How would one turn around 360 degrees? With a mouse you just pick up the mouse when you get to the edge of the mousepad, but this thing looks pretty heavy…
Then again, if it’s just to control the virtual crowbar in Half-Life 2, count me in!
“Of course, if you buy it bundled with the Falcon, the price goes up by about $200″
– We are offering a bundle with a free copy of Orange Box. You can reserve it at Novint at http://www.novint.com
“How would one turn around 360 degrees?”
– the inner part of the workspace is position controlled like a mouse. The outer area of the workspace has virtual springs so it rotates you like a joystick. It is a very innovative and effective way to navigate - even better than the mouse with some practice as you do not need to pick it up when you hit the edge of the mousepad, and you can customize the position and rotation aiming speeds for a good combination of precision and gross movements.