Haptics! Novint Falcon lets you touch and feel.

When I first bought my P5 Virtual Reality Glove, made by Essential Reality, and started playing with it, I noticed two things…

Firstly, there wasn’t any software for it, except for a handful of games that it shipped with. And only one of those games (Black & White) used it even vaguely like a Virtual Reality glove.

Secondly, when I tried to make my own games that used it like a glove, and had physics support so I could pick up blocks and throw them around, and things like that, there was a major problem… My real hand would go straight through virtual objects without any resistance, which makes it a lot harder to grab virtual objects that you can’t feel (especially when you have no depth perception, but I’ll talk about Stereoscopic 3D later). Also, it’s a lot harder to implement physics with a VR tracker than you might think, since physics libraries need to know how much force you’re applying to objects, and what direction you’re pushing them. It turns out, it’s impossible to measure how hard you’re pushing when there is nothing real for you to push against. It’s Newton’s most famous law of motion, every action has to have an equal and opposite reaction. I tried basing the amount of force on position instead, using how far through the object you put your hand. But that just sent everything flying away at ridiculous speeds, since there’s nothing stopping you putting your hand anywhere.

I solved the first problem by writing a new driver DLL which used absolute tracking instead of relative tracking. I then made a program called the Direct Input Emulator (DIE) that mapped the Glove position, rotation, and 2 finger bends to fixed Direct Input axes. The fixed mapping wasn’t very flexible, so I decided it needed to be programmable, and so after DIE 0.03 I rewrote it as the Programmable Input Emulator 0.04 (PIE). Later I realised that PIE was impossible to find with a google search, so I renamed it GlovePIE after searching for various names in Google until I found one that returned zero results.

But the second problem was always unsolvable, unless you had literally tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you could buy a PHANTOM, CyberGrasp, or CyberForce. You would hold the PHANTOM pen, or strap the CyberGrasp or CyberForce to your arm, and it would stop your arm or fingers from going through objects, and give you a very precise sense of touch. You could feel virtual objects just like they were real objects. But if you have to ask how much those devices costs, then you can’t afford them.

A company called Novint changed all that a few years ago. They made a device called the Falcon, which is almost the same as the PHANTOM (since they used to work for that company), but at a gamer’s price of $200. (Actually you can get it for only $160 if you tell them I sent you, by typing the code “GlovePIE” into the referral box).

The Novint Falcon is an absolute 3D position tracking device. You hold the ball (or the new pistol grip) and move your hand and it can tell where it is in 3D space to within a 400th of an inch. That’s 0.06 of a millimeter accuracy in position tracking. It only has a range of about 4 inches (10cm) in each direction though, so we aren’t talking about huge arm movements. The idea is that it is a miniature representation of the virtual world. So you can do small precise movements and gestures and they get scaled up. There’s no rotation tracking, and the ball doesn’t rotate (yet), so it’s only 3DOF, but you won’t find more precise 3D position tracking. Which would be cool on it’s own.

But it’s primarily an output device. It lets you feel the objects in the virtual environment. You can run your hand along a virtual surface and feel all the bumps and grooves on it. You can trace your hand around the outside of an object, but can’t put your hand through a solid object. You could think of it like a solid 3D volumetric display with a resolution of 1600 x 1600 x 1600 that you blindly feel around with your fingers. But it precisely detects and responds to your touch 1000 times per second. So things don’t have to feel solid, they can squish under your touch, they can be springy, they can be slippery, they can be rough. They could even be liquids of various viscosities. There is a demo they get people to try with a ball of various materials that you can feel.

Of course, it isn’t just about feeling objects, you also get to feel getting shot, stabbed, or hacked to death. Not to the full realistic extent of course, but it’s actually extremely beneficial to be able to feel the force of a bullet coming from a certain direction so you know where to find the enemy. You can also feel gun recoils, explosions, or any other forces that games have.

The falcon can do a maximum force of a bit more than 2 pounds, which is about 1 kilogram. Which means 9.8 Newtons. Which is about as much as you would want safely.

Gamers are used to having only two senses: sight and hearing. Adding a third sense is a huge leap in user interfaces that I would love to try.

See the website: http://novint.com for info and videos. And if you do decide to buy one, please don’t forget to use the referral code “GlovePIE” to save $40 and get the full package for only $160 (and if 3 people use my code, I win a free Novint Falcon! Yay!).