Another really weird but interesting bit of the history of the Novint Falcon is that it was actually the first hardware device you could buy via the steam store, and that Novint regularly tried to give them away as prizes as part of various game tournament events and that Valve actually has continued to make minute compatability updates for it in various games over the years, with the most recent of those updates happening in January of 2024. That's right. There's apparently still people actively using these things and people on Valve making them play a little better in their games.
Gordo, I'm guessing based off of the fact that you deleted your earlier comment you checked the update logs for about 16 different valve published games for this year.
HOLY CRAP this is a blast from my past personally! I worked for Novint briefly in about 2007-2008 or so? Half-Life 2 was genuinely so fun with this thing, I was really spoiled by it. It definitely needed a few more cycles of testing & adjustment but it really added so much to the gameplay experience. The texture demo (with the orb that changes material) was mind-blowing on its own, nevermind how much more fun shooters were with the proper kick from firing & impact from enemies. I wish Novint had had just a TINY bit more success, just enough for development to lead to something more usable, because the haptic precision was really something special. Combine these haptics with the feel of the Wii, you get something incredible tbh. (From what I could feel in 1-2-Switch, Nintendo has some incredible haptics in the Switch that have gone massively underutilized, but still nothing as bonkers as what was in the Falcon). It's really no joke that to be sold on it you had to try it, because it was hard to get anyone to check it out at the mall kiosk where I worked, but everyone who tried it was really enthusiastic about it... shame the price & its physical size were both just too much for how little game support it had. The fact that I had to re-calibrate the particular test Falcon I had EVERY TIME I used it? Hard to make me enthusiastic about selling it. (The later models were less problematic in this regard, but it tickled me to see you complain about the calibration because boy was that a common issue lol) (In the end I was fired from Novint because I essentially gave up trying to sell devices at that kiosk and just socialized with other people working at that mall. Actually selling the thing successfully would have involved being dishonest and I just can't do that lol. I work in user experience now, so now I can help improve products rather than sugar-coating them, which is much more for me I think! Honestly I wish I'd been able to do user testing for them back then & get EXACTLY the sort of feedback you're giving in this video, it might have genuinely helped so much.)
those things must be really hard in PID control to program, no wonder game devs can't easily figure it out, like just buying a library and plugging it in.
WDYM "being dishonest"? From what I seen, the device works great as it is, as long as you play a first person shooter. Those horrible minigames were a mistake, clearly, because it makes no sense to use the Falcon for these kind of games to begin with, let alone how terribly they were coded. But I can see it could have been successful, had it been marketed as a device for FPS games only, same as racing wheels are exclusively for... racing games. Today it could be great for 3DOF VR as well.
Hey! I used to work with one of these: Bit of a story time. I worked for a Cyberpsycology lab, and we used all sorts of tech to help people with their phobias, conditions, etc, and I spoke with Novint about what we do, and they were stoked to send us a free Falcon to use. We used this thing to help people who have certain phobias when it came to textures, or even just touching physical objects (like say a Snake or Spider). From what I recall it worked really well for that purpose. Novint was awesome for sending us a device to use for medical purposes that were just starting to get off the ground.
For those wondering: Haptic feedback gloves that allow you to "feel" things do exist, and there's even some integration in places like Steam VR. Apparently, they're even rather comfortable to use, too. However, they are out of the price range of most gamers right now - you'll be paying 4 figures for even a decent pair, plus hundreds more for required accessories (such as replacement glove liners), putting them solidly in the "commercial and industrial" side of the market, with a toe-dip from the "gold-plated enthusiast" side to keep it interesting. You'll likely hear about them in the news once the price drops to hundreds of dollars rather then thousands.
Gun companies have been doing this lately , the CZ Skorpion has a competitor called the B&T Grasshopper Mouse ... Which is a mouse that eats scorpions lol.
I recently realized there's just as much time between now and the release of Half-Life 2, as there is between Half-Life 2 and the release of Duck Hunt for the NES
I like how the Gamespot clip is supposed to imply "oh he's gonna use the controller to touch hot video game women hahaha" but my immediate first thought was "oh is he a furry or something?" because of the mention of "touching real fur"
Hey lgr, chances you see this are close to none. But from the bottom of my heart thx for the years of great content you have been putting out for what the last 15 plus years now? XD I used to watch you back in the day and just stumble back on your channel. Great to see you are still nerding out with the collective web!
In college back around '07 I was on a team that was developing a very similar software as a project, using this thing as the input device. That application is what it was truly made for.
@@hypercynicdepends on the person really. There are rigs that cost more than real cars lol I'm sure someone out there has built a fighter jet cockpit in their basement and that can't be cheap.
Penumbra came with my Falcon, it's a first person survival horror game by the makers of Amnesia. It's mostly pitch black and you have to use the Falcon to feel around in the darkness to find things and figure out what you're touching. Was super cool and one of the best haptic experiences outside of FPS games.
You wouldn't happen to still have the files would you? I would love to add it to the preservation bundle. I contacted frictional a few years ago, but they weren't able to give me the files because of a third party.
These kinds of Oddware videos are the best, someone really went to great lengths of effort to make this thing and maybe in some universe it took off. Here we are still stuck with our dinky mice, when we could have the FALCON
bro completely sold me on a 20 year old piece of obscure hardware, I love that HL2 has always been the medium for groundbreaking hardware. The first proto-VR controls, 3D and haptic tech all used HL2 as a showcase. What a wonderful game and wonderful time. We had no idea how good we had it.
When I was doing my PhD part of my project used a Novint Falcon. We collaborated with a dentist on building a dental training simulator and we met with a doctor for surgery, but it couldn't get the feeling between the different layers of tissue correct.
11:54 was smooth AF, loved that. Also loved the laughing while playing with the settings before that, and the little nods to some firearms knowledge. Clint, you're like the cool older brother I always wanted 🤣
I had one of these and regret selling it to this day! It was so far ahead of its time and the feedback was insane. HL2 and Crysis were so fun on it. Only issue… after heavy use, your right shoulder starts to hurt like crazy. Novint Falcon for life 🤙
I was sitting here thinking what a terrible device with no real use case.... Then when he fired up HL2 and Portal I was shocked at how cool that feedback must feel in a supported game!
I still have mine and it's the main drawback. A mouse is way more ergonomic. This is a workout to use. You have to hold your arm up the whole time and then you're not only moving your whole arm to aim, but you're also fighting the force feedback. But that's the whole point, so you get the amazing force feedback experience, but you also get an arm workout, haha.
@@volvo09 They made a huge mistake marketing it as a mouse replacement. It had one amazing use case, fps games. Maybe some other games could have been made specifically for it, like a point and click adventure with lots of weird stuff you could "feel", but that seems like an expensive pipe dream.
I think the Falcon would be a great product for at-desk or sitting VR players who might have limited space. Would be very interesting to toy with. Wish innovative things like this could be more successful.
Portal 3 when? "Oh. Hello again Chelle. Could you go fetch me a pin from that pin straightener machine? It seems to have malfunctioned because of a former test participant."
Awesome video! We were lucky enough to get to work with Novint on a few projects in around 2007. They were absolutely lovely people who took a chance on us as a young inexperienced company - I'll be forever grateful to them for that. The Falcon was a unique thing and always got comments from people who walked into our office! If any Novint folks come across this video then I hope you're all doing well.
I had to click this as I used to work for LUNAR and the prototypes were all over the office. Unfortunately I worked there shortly after this hit market so I don’t have any inside info for you on the engineering or industrial design, but did want to thank you for your deep dive! That was more than I knew at the time for sure
A few minutes into this video I remarked "I bet this was a high-end product for serious applications cost reduced to a game controller." Poor Novint learned the hard way that for consumer hardware you also have to have killer software and support to be successful.
Software or not this thing never really had a chance to go mainstream. I mean just look at VR. It was supposed to change the way we all play games and it still hasn't been able to break out of being just a niche novelty.
I _think_ a physics glitch caused it to bounce sideways and then it fell off the collision mesh. The game then softlocked waiting for it to reach the bowling pins, except the ball was accelerating straight down at 1g.
@@bewilderbeestie This is why you have cutoff-checks to ensure the physics objects are within bounds. This is one of the simplest things to implement with a simple box collider/trigger surrounding the playable area...
Glad this finally got its moment to shine. I'm surprised the mouse pad didn't work better for you but I suppose I always had it on a grippier desk. Never thought to tape it down lol.
Yeah I was surprised how much it moved around honestly, ideally I'd have just had it bumped right up against the monitor or something. Thanks again for sending this over for me to check out, it's a shockingly fun device!
@@LGR Just to add my 2 cents. I imported one to the UK back in 2009 and had it for a pretty long time before selling it. Anyway, I'm baffled as to why it's moving around on the desk like that in your vid as mine stayed put!
Yeah it's weird, I have LGR in my followed channels list and I just realized "huh, I haven't seen a video recommended in the longest time, well time to see if there's any good looking oddwares since I last watched."
The falcon/mouse analogy goes several steps further than they originally considered. A falcon is more exciting to look at, but there are far fewer out in the wild and they are far more expensive to acquire for yourself. And this particular falcon is extinct in the wild and almost so in captivity.
@@Stoney3K It very much applies to real falcons too. The peregrine falcon is the fastest bird in the world, reaching speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour when diving on prey. With said prey mostly consisting of other birds, which it takes out in flight. It is basically a cruise missile made of meat.
32:51 I think this is the most joy I've seen you get out of an Oddware. Almost like something briefly lived up to the hype in our minds when we see stuff like this in PCGamer and just dream.
That's because the hardware was shockingly good, it's just the implementation was lacking. It needs well made software to take full advantage of it AND it needs a better mounting solution.
When I worked as an engineer for a design firm in 1999 I actually tested out that Phantom Haptic Interface using an early 3D sculpting app similar to what Z-Brush eventually became. The idea was to use it for industrial design and make the process of interfacing with the computer more "natural" to create 3D models. It was early, and obviously had it's clunks, and given the price, the company didn't adopt it, but it was cool to see.
Thank you LGR for featuring this!!! I was in my late teens when I actually walked into a MicroCenter in Cincinnati and found one of these on display, I had no idea the make / model. All I knew, they had it attached to gaming PC with some titles that were compatible, and I thought it was pretty cool! Granted, this pricetag for me at the time would've been way too high to consider, but I did enjoy the hour or so I spent on that demo PC. Ah, this one hits me right in the nostalgia. Thanks again LGR
There was a time when he was reviewing something else, and while watching some videos, the XP screensaver popped up with the word "Penis" or something lol.
Had one of these back in the day to experiment with on Source games. Interesting idea, but also a prime example of “be careful what you wish for” . Even though it added an interesting tactile experience for shooters, it made games like HL2 significantly more difficult even on easy mode, because the ability to have precise mouse-like accuracy was almost nonexistent.
This kept happening all through the 90s and 00s: Someone comes up with a weird peripheral device that's interesting enough to make it into some news shows and magazines. Some early adopter types buy it. The device, at best, works okay with the supplied demo software and maybe one or two games whose developers agreed to add support for it, however it's an afterthought at best. And that's it. If it's a really good idea, the technology gets bought and integrated into something that has nothing to do with the PC enthusiast market.
The nostalgia i felt when you opened the tutorial software almost made me cry it was so intense. That 2000's "we know youre in a dark room" vibe. God i miss it man, everything today is so bright and mood-less.
You really had me in the first half, man. I followed this thing like CRAZY back in the day - There was a huge belief that the "Nintendo Revolution" would use some sort of input like this for a while. So glad someone made a great video about how this worked. Thanks and thanks to the person who let you make a video with theirs!
The journalist from gamespot went full Beavis and Butthead whem asked where this device will be most useful for🤣 seriously, being able to feel feel fur is quite amazing.
This is easily one of the coolest pieces of oddware I've ever seen on this channel. So glad you got to review one of these! I didn't even know they existed until right now. 🤯
The plague of 90s and 00s Oddware is that some great ideas were come up with, but nobody knew how to use them. Just some of the spitball ideas at the end of this video were probably beyond what devs 15 and 20 years ago were thinking about. Those minigames are a prime example. They had no idea how to properly utilize this thing. Force feedback in a shooter is cool and all, but an exploration game where feeling an object in realtime could help you solve a puzzle is a prime use case for this thing. Imagine a VR game where you could feel the texture of an object you were holding. That's not something we're even close to emulating right now and if this thing could somehow, someway be incorporated into a VR setup, how great could things be? (I know, it's probably far too bulky to ever work, it's just a thought experiment.)
This also happened to land at the rise of the keyboard and mouse mafia. Suddenly, like almost overnight, a lot of PC gamers were very militant about how a keyboard and mouse was the perfect input device and no one had ever used anything else and stop trying to turn their computers into dumb Nintendo toys. It was a very strange and very abrupt shift in the market. A lot of neat input devices died, even well-established ones, as they fell in the sights of the "real men only use mice" gang. Even the venerable joystick went from a common peripheral to persona non grata quite rapidly. Tangentally, this is actually considered the main reason that Freespace 2 bombed horribly, despite how popular Freespace had been. Freespace 1 had given a lot of sticks a good workout, and then suddenly no one had a joystick(or anything but disdain for one). The game played like warm poop without one, because flying a space ship with a mouse sucks.
@@CptJistuceit may be connected with two things; firstly, it's the development of hardware, which led to better visuals which led to popularity of FPS genre and, in general, action games from first and third person (to think of it, there was a time when epic and cool games were RTS, like C&C!..), and secondly, a trend of those FPS getting more and more competitive.
@@strakhovandrri The FPS had already exploded. And that had led to the birth of Descent, which was very much a joystick-first game. And Freespace rode in on Descent's reputation(initially being titled "Descent: Freespace")
Hell yeah. I have one of these. Bought it in 2013. I have the ball and the pistol grip. The haptic feedback really blew me away with Half-Life 2. I was in college at the time and I brought it to my microcomputer maintenance class and showed it off. The recoil impulse would change with different weapons, picking up different objects felt like you were holding something with relatively similar substance. The grip is modeled after a Walther P99. That is why it is so comfortable. One thing that was really interesting was doing 3D modeling. I think 3DS max supported it and it was really intuitive to use.
At my university one of the labs had one of pen-style controllers you show in the beginning. That demo has always stuck around with me - squishing the rubber ball and writing on different kinds of paper/plastic felt so amazingly realistic.
I was a 3d modeling student back when 3d sculpting started becoming a ting, and I distinctly remember drooling over similar devices, not for gaming, but for sculpting.
to paraphrase, "If I had a penny for every time a CAD input device got reworked into a gaming controller, I'd have tuppence; which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice."
But they're always intentionally bad because they need to make something that people will actually buy but just useless enough not to compete with their professional product with ultra-wide margins. Although this looks mostly OK, but suffers all of the usual problems. Poor drivers/software, no public SDK or code or documentation and nobody ends up using it.
I use my SpaceMouse for games like Elite Dangerous, and that basically just works out of the box. You have to either set the joystick axis manually or copy a config someone else made off a forum, but it works wonderfully when you do. Got the idea from The Expanse, in the TV series they use a spacemouse as the control stick in the cockpit.
I had one of these back in the day. Super cool device! The support in the Penumbra games was really wild - you could enter a '3D object interaction' mode to interact with and move objects. I distinctly remember pushing against a soft-body mattress and feeling the Falcon push back against my hand like a spring.
0:14 Hey...Clint...it's the shirt! Thanks for wearing of The Forgotten Machines!!!!! There never was any doubt, but you ARE just that much more a truly AWESOME guy! And appropriately for an LGR Oddware episode...you sure picked a weird one this time... Love it!
Finally unpacked the last bin of goodies from VCF Midwest, I’m awful at putting that stuff off 😅 It was great hanging out a bit more at Southwest, by the way.
Until they turned to shit. Half life alyx is awesome but that's all for the last decade. Seriously, it goes Portal 2 - Alyx with only shit inbetween. Valve is dead.
We had a demo for this at a LAN party I attended during this time. As I recall it had really decent support for left 4 dead as well. They even sent some units to give away as LAN prizes. I'm sure there's still lan attendees that still have them.
I got to use this at a trade show before it was out for the public to buy and was absolutely blown away by it! It's such a cool piece of tech to use and I was hoping we would see more of it once it was released. But instead it became an incredibly obscure item. Playing Half-Life 2 with this was awesome, but what I really loved was the demo where you went through different viscosity things, like maple syrup, vs water.
Hey Clint. I still have my Falcon from 2008. Actually, that's not true. I originally purchased a white one, but after about six months, one of the servos stopped working properly. I contacted customer support and sent some log files, and they agreed to send me a new unit, so long as I destroyed the old one. When the new one came, it was black instead of white. I took my old unit out to my front porch and smashed it with a hammer, then sent them photos. They were shocked to see how much I'd destroyed it. The replacement is the one I still have. Supposedly Novint gave Valve a whole bunch of Falcons to make native support for Source games happen, and they did make it happen, but those units were later discovered in a dumpster outside Valve HQ. So the legend goes. I played Penumbra with it. I think the installer was linked in an email after I registered the product. It was a specific installer for the HaptX version of the game, which is why your versions didn't work. I'm sure it's available somewhere in an archive. It was one of the most immersive games available, because your "hand" was represented in 3D space, and you could move it around, similar to how you moved it around in the ball demo. This allowed you to feel the walls, open doors, and do a number of other things with your virtual hand. It was pretty cool. I got fairly good with the Falcon in TF2, and really enjoyed it for what it was, as I played on my crappy Windows 7 laptop with a dual-core CPU, integrated graphics and 4 gigs of RAM. You'd think VR would be great with this, but as you said earlier, the problem is that it's not a 6 DOF device. In VR, you want to be able to move your hand(s) freely and in any direction, and the Falcon doesn't allow you to do that. In fact, it's extra weird, because the Falcon would control your head. Imagine you're in VR, and to look around, you have to move your entire arm, and you can't exactly look in any direction. I think it would lead to major motion sickness.
I remember that! It wasn't Jamie but it was one of the M5 employees who was using it to model Kari's behind for the mold for the airplane toilet suction one. It was basically one of the pilots.
Good memory! It was being sucked into the airplane toilet seat myth. They took a 3D scan of Kari Byron's bum, then Kari used the 3D mouse to build up the size of her bum for making a rubber casting mold. Probably used by Jamie in another episode, but I remember Kari's bum well!
Wow thanks for looking at such a crazy device. I remember seeing this at Tiger Direct eons ago and every few years the concept of it would pop back in my brain, but could never figure out what the device was, leading me to believe it was something I had imagined as a kid.
You can see in the beginning of the video what this tech is for. Medical and engineering industries. They just attempted to adapt it to the video game market
Hey Clint, play Infra with this, it's based on portal 2's version of the source engine. It is a first person adeventure game from 2015/16 made by finnish developers. It's theme is urbax, abandones places, tech-y puzzles and cold war cloak and dagger stuff.
Wrong. It would be TERRIBLE for VR as its action is confined to a TINY position of 3D space on a desk. 🤷 A 6DOF VR controller with high end LIM haptics like Meta's Touch Pro controllers is a better VR control solution than something like this in basically every way imaginable. What you lose in force feedback you gain in proper wide area 6DOF maneuverability (unlike the MINISCULE like 6" area of 6DOF control a Novint Falcon provides).
@@GoldSrc_ Those games would still be infinitely better with some kind of 6DOF haptic gloves than anything like this. This must be stationary on a desk w/ very limited range of motion technology simply doesn't make sense for VR. 🤷
I actually made the menu you are looking at for the HL2 mod for the settings. It was one of my first jobs. I was 14 at the time and they found me through my modding community. Amazing experience!
I hope that one day LGR will review the "UNION REALITY HEAD MASTER" one of the most obscure and strange PC gaming controllers ever, which used the same technology as the wiimote years before the wiimote
This is one of those devices that lives or dies on it's implementation, and Valve did it masterfully with HL2. Knew these existed, but never knew how cool the HL2 implementation was.
Feels really analogous to VR in general. Incredibly impressive demos, obvious wealth of potential, but very very few games/apps that properly utilize it.
I was interning with a company in the very early 00's and they had this in to demo one day, and the app they had loaded for us was a clay sculpting program. In that use case it felt pretty real and at the time the demo was quite impressive.
definitely remember seeing threads online about people buying these second hand in the mid-late 2010's and making custom "end plates" and code for these to drive them like that.
The demo I saw at Fry's Electronics had a "sand" sphere and it blew my mind feeling the the texture as you pushed the cursor through the ball. Always been tempted to grab on of these just for the hell of it, possibly for CAD work.
The recoil effect sounds genuinely cool, but it's such a limited use-case and as impressive as the device is, looks extremely impractical. It'd be cool if there was a more practical way to achieve the effect. Very interesting video!
I remember this! Arma, Crysis, and so many other games went so far as to explicitly add support for this neat little tool. I remember really wanting one, but could never find one in my area :C
Another really weird but interesting bit of the history of the Novint Falcon is that it was actually the first hardware device you could buy via the steam store, and that Novint regularly tried to give them away as prizes as part of various game tournament events and that Valve actually has continued to make minute compatability updates for it in various games over the years, with the most recent of those updates happening in January of 2024. That's right. There's apparently still people actively using these things and people on Valve making them play a little better in their games.
That’s awesome, I didn’t come across that!
Gordo, I'm guessing based off of the fact that you deleted your earlier comment you checked the update logs for about 16 different valve published games for this year.
Honestly, Gaben could just buy the abysmal stocks of Novint and just... Make official steam equivalents of the Falcon.
I want one...
...they should sell then integrated into desk cabinets, maybe for rich people even rotating flight simulator style cabinets🤩
HOLY CRAP this is a blast from my past personally! I worked for Novint briefly in about 2007-2008 or so? Half-Life 2 was genuinely so fun with this thing, I was really spoiled by it. It definitely needed a few more cycles of testing & adjustment but it really added so much to the gameplay experience. The texture demo (with the orb that changes material) was mind-blowing on its own, nevermind how much more fun shooters were with the proper kick from firing & impact from enemies. I wish Novint had had just a TINY bit more success, just enough for development to lead to something more usable, because the haptic precision was really something special. Combine these haptics with the feel of the Wii, you get something incredible tbh. (From what I could feel in 1-2-Switch, Nintendo has some incredible haptics in the Switch that have gone massively underutilized, but still nothing as bonkers as what was in the Falcon).
It's really no joke that to be sold on it you had to try it, because it was hard to get anyone to check it out at the mall kiosk where I worked, but everyone who tried it was really enthusiastic about it... shame the price & its physical size were both just too much for how little game support it had. The fact that I had to re-calibrate the particular test Falcon I had EVERY TIME I used it? Hard to make me enthusiastic about selling it. (The later models were less problematic in this regard, but it tickled me to see you complain about the calibration because boy was that a common issue lol)
(In the end I was fired from Novint because I essentially gave up trying to sell devices at that kiosk and just socialized with other people working at that mall. Actually selling the thing successfully would have involved being dishonest and I just can't do that lol. I work in user experience now, so now I can help improve products rather than sugar-coating them, which is much more for me I think! Honestly I wish I'd been able to do user testing for them back then & get EXACTLY the sort of feedback you're giving in this video, it might have genuinely helped so much.)
Dude, there's one thing they needed to do to make this successful. One simple tricke:
Market it to perverts.
I feel like this device would honestly just be useful as an input for 3D drafting and modeling for amateurs or even small buisnesses.
those things must be really hard in PID control to program, no wonder game devs can't easily figure it out, like just buying a library and plugging it in.
WDYM "being dishonest"? From what I seen, the device works great as it is, as long as you play a first person shooter. Those horrible minigames were a mistake, clearly, because it makes no sense to use the Falcon for these kind of games to begin with, let alone how terribly they were coded. But I can see it could have been successful, had it been marketed as a device for FPS games only, same as racing wheels are exclusively for... racing games. Today it could be great for 3DOF VR as well.
Thanks for sharing, and your sense of integrity!
Hey! I used to work with one of these: Bit of a story time.
I worked for a Cyberpsycology lab, and we used all sorts of tech to help people with their phobias, conditions, etc, and I spoke with Novint about what we do, and they were stoked to send us a free Falcon to use.
We used this thing to help people who have certain phobias when it came to textures, or even just touching physical objects (like say a Snake or Spider). From what I recall it worked really well for that purpose. Novint was awesome for sending us a device to use for medical purposes that were just starting to get off the ground.
no one needs to touch a snake or spider, what is wrong with you
@@kittydaddy2023 you're not the sharpest tool in the shed, are ya?
@andrewsneacker1256 No he ain't, no he most definitely ain't. Lmao.
What technology do you use to get over fear of success?
@@foodiusmaximus a cocaine dispenser? ;)
Love how he just casually has a red dot ready to slap onto the pistol grip attachment. Truly, a man of many disciplines.
For those wondering: Haptic feedback gloves that allow you to "feel" things do exist, and there's even some integration in places like Steam VR. Apparently, they're even rather comfortable to use, too.
However, they are out of the price range of most gamers right now - you'll be paying 4 figures for even a decent pair, plus hundreds more for required accessories (such as replacement glove liners), putting them solidly in the "commercial and industrial" side of the market, with a toe-dip from the "gold-plated enthusiast" side to keep it interesting.
You'll likely hear about them in the news once the price drops to hundreds of dollars rather then thousands.
There are also DIY projects to do the same - can't speak for how well they work, but they exist and are much cheaper.
I love how in their launcher, there's a spot to just click and get their current stock price. That design decision didn't age well.
Oh wow. That's just asking the universe to smack you.
I feel it aged perfectly.
@@jameslawrence8734 same
just like gamestop soon to be non existant
@@trueKENTUCKYShill confirmed.
"The Falcon is the predator of the mouse". That is so stupid and I love it.
Such confidence.
Gun companies have been doing this lately , the CZ Skorpion has a competitor called the B&T Grasshopper Mouse ... Which is a mouse that eats scorpions lol.
Same as the guy who marketed and led the production of the Chevy Camaro.
"Camaro is an animal that eats Mustangs"
"I love the Falcon. It's so bad."
Falcons do not eat mice. They attack and eat other birds exclusively. That is why the Peregrine Falcon is the US Air Force mascot.
I was like "oh man they made this thing work with newer games too" and then I remembered Portal was also from 2007.
Just to make you happy it takes just a couple more years before it is 20 years old.
Queue the Matt Damon aging GIF.
I recently realized there's just as much time between now and the release of Half-Life 2, as there is between Half-Life 2 and the release of Duck Hunt for the NES
@@Rutgerman95 You stop that right now
You read this fact and all you hear is the spicy salsa music over the radio
I like how the Gamespot clip is supposed to imply "oh he's gonna use the controller to touch hot video game women hahaha" but my immediate first thought was "oh is he a furry or something?" because of the mention of "touching real fur"
I really don't see that implication, imagine feeling pleasure out of heptic feedback while moving the cursor over Lara Croft, LMAO
either petting a cat, or a furry. close enough.
NO , THAT GUY WAS DEFINITELY A FURRY
Hey lgr, chances you see this are close to none. But from the bottom of my heart thx for the years of great content you have been putting out for what the last 15 plus years now? XD I used to watch you back in the day and just stumble back on your channel. Great to see you are still nerding out with the collective web!
This device actually looks perfect for Surgeon Simulator
Especially with the gun attachment.
buy a real surgical one for it!
In college back around '07 I was on a team that was developing a very similar software as a project, using this thing as the input device. That application is what it was truly made for.
A old age telephone operator simulator 😂
@@AniRaptor2001I think Da Vinci has some really similar controllers for their robot
Cons: "Dude, you're considering spending $190 on a game controller"
Flight sim fans: "Yeah, haha, that's crazy..."
Fighting Game Players: "Haha yeah imagine paying like $200-300 on a controller haha"
Mechanical keyboard fans: I just got this custom keycap for only $80.
Truck sim fans sweating
@@hypercynic there’s a guy who’s ground-up built an exact replica of a 747 cockpit with functional control panels to play MSFS.
@@hypercynicdepends on the person really. There are rigs that cost more than real cars lol I'm sure someone out there has built a fighter jet cockpit in their basement and that can't be cheap.
Penumbra came with my Falcon, it's a first person survival horror game by the makers of Amnesia. It's mostly pitch black and you have to use the Falcon to feel around in the darkness to find things and figure out what you're touching. Was super cool and one of the best haptic experiences outside of FPS games.
i played the entire penumbra series and i cant imagine how much harder it would've been , combat was not the best even for mouse.....those damn hounds
You wouldn't happen to still have the files would you? I would love to add it to the preservation bundle. I contacted frictional a few years ago, but they weren't able to give me the files because of a third party.
That’s wild! Penumbra and the rest of the amnesia series are the best games I’ve played in horror
Penumbra with this? Wow 👌🏻👌🏻 Now my brain is trying to imagine it with Amnesia: Bunker 🤔🤔🤔🤔
WHAAAT now damn I want one!!!
This may be one of the best responses to a product ive ever seen from you. seems like a genuine product that had real potential
These kinds of Oddware videos are the best, someone really went to great lengths of effort to make this thing and maybe in some universe it took off. Here we are still stuck with our dinky mice, when we could have the FALCON
its insane how long youve been showcasing cool stuff and all these years later, theres still something as crazy and unique as this
Right? The well of oddities is practically bottomless!
@@LGRwill you upload the bottomless oddities to patreon? 😜
bro completely sold me on a 20 year old piece of obscure hardware, I love that HL2 has always been the medium for groundbreaking hardware. The first proto-VR controls, 3D and haptic tech all used HL2 as a showcase. What a wonderful game and wonderful time. We had no idea how good we had it.
It's only 17 years, it has not been 20 years since I graduated from highschool lol
And HL2 on VR is fucking great too
the force feedback jostick is some 30 years old
Remeber when there were big budget single player games 😭
@@No_True_Scotsman Have you been living under a rock? There has been a bunch of big single player games in recent times.
This thing would be fantastic for a surgeon simulator VR game.
" You can really feel that liver!"
From what I've read, professional-grade training tools for surgeons was indeed one of the things that this got used for.
When I was doing my PhD part of my project used a Novint Falcon. We collaborated with a dentist on building a dental training simulator and we met with a doctor for surgery, but it couldn't get the feeling between the different layers of tissue correct.
@@stevethepocketit’s in the video
I'll bet a few pervs out there thought of tons of weird applications for it 😅
Haven't heard that LGR laugh since the 'Photoshop Neural Filters' episode. Which I shall now watch again... thanks, I needed that.
11:54 was smooth AF, loved that. Also loved the laughing while playing with the settings before that, and the little nods to some firearms knowledge. Clint, you're like the cool older brother I always wanted 🤣
“Anyways our ‘toy’ is working perfectly” i love the careful choice of words
The screen swooping into full screen was a very cool subtle effect. Really enjoyed that. Thanks LGR :)
Very nice very clean
Yeah, I think he always does that when there needs to be a transition from camera to video capture, but I didn't notice it until your comment.
I had one of these and regret selling it to this day! It was so far ahead of its time and the feedback was insane. HL2 and Crysis were so fun on it. Only issue… after heavy use, your right shoulder starts to hurt like crazy. Novint Falcon for life 🤙
Yeah I remember seeing the option for it in Battlefeild 2 always wondered what is was.
I was sitting here thinking what a terrible device with no real use case.... Then when he fired up HL2 and Portal I was shocked at how cool that feedback must feel in a supported game!
I could definitely see how your right shoulder would be totally exhausted after holding it like that
I still have mine and it's the main drawback. A mouse is way more ergonomic. This is a workout to use. You have to hold your arm up the whole time and then you're not only moving your whole arm to aim, but you're also fighting the force feedback. But that's the whole point, so you get the amazing force feedback experience, but you also get an arm workout, haha.
@@volvo09 They made a huge mistake marketing it as a mouse replacement. It had one amazing use case, fps games. Maybe some other games could have been made specifically for it, like a point and click adventure with lots of weird stuff you could "feel", but that seems like an expensive pipe dream.
I think the Falcon would be a great product for at-desk or sitting VR players who might have limited space. Would be very interesting to toy with. Wish innovative things like this could be more successful.
I think this would've been a better thing to sell to a big theme park or arcade as a novelty than a "at home" kinda deal
Definitely could see some use cases in an amusement center setting
@@LGR Well... It was most definitely "amusing" to watch
Oh true! Definitely would play half an hour of shooting games at an arcade with this.
If it came with a fake silicone mouth accessory I'd be interested in buying one.
Super monkey ball
You know you’ve made a bad bowling game when your bowling ball gains sentience and exits its digital confinement.
Or the greatest bowling game of all time.
Portal 3 when? "Oh. Hello again Chelle. Could you go fetch me a pin from that pin straightener machine? It seems to have malfunctioned because of a former test participant."
They do that in real life too.. like seriously they just up and go through the window for like no reason.. there's not even windows in the alley..
I'm thinking that maybe the controller needed to be upright to play it? It would make more sense.
Awesome video! We were lucky enough to get to work with Novint on a few projects in around 2007. They were absolutely lovely people who took a chance on us as a young inexperienced company - I'll be forever grateful to them for that. The Falcon was a unique thing and always got comments from people who walked into our office! If any Novint folks come across this video then I hope you're all doing well.
I had to click this as I used to work for LUNAR and the prototypes were all over the office. Unfortunately I worked there shortly after this hit market so I don’t have any inside info for you on the engineering or industrial design, but did want to thank you for your deep dive! That was more than I knew at the time for sure
Love hearing when you get legitimately excited about things, it's a delight to experience it vicariously.
A few minutes into this video I remarked "I bet this was a high-end product for serious applications cost reduced to a game controller." Poor Novint learned the hard way that for consumer hardware you also have to have killer software and support to be successful.
who
Software or not this thing never really had a chance to go mainstream. I mean just look at VR. It was supposed to change the way we all play games and it still hasn't been able to break out of being just a niche novelty.
I laughed for five minutes after the bowling ball exited.
Thank you.
I _think_ a physics glitch caused it to bounce sideways and then it fell off the collision mesh. The game then softlocked waiting for it to reach the bowling pins, except the ball was accelerating straight down at 1g.
@@bewilderbeestie This is why you have cutoff-checks to ensure the physics objects are within bounds.
This is one of the simplest things to implement with a simple box collider/trigger surrounding the playable area...
Glad this finally got its moment to shine. I'm surprised the mouse pad didn't work better for you but I suppose I always had it on a grippier desk. Never thought to tape it down lol.
Yeah I was surprised how much it moved around honestly, ideally I'd have just had it bumped right up against the monitor or something. Thanks again for sending this over for me to check out, it's a shockingly fun device!
@@LGR Just to add my 2 cents. I imported one to the UK back in 2009 and had it for a pretty long time before selling it. Anyway, I'm baffled as to why it's moving around on the desk like that in your vid as mine stayed put!
It was ahead of its time. This would be killer for sitting in VR
Dear Algorithm, it’s been so long since you recommended an LGR video, please show me more.
Yeah it's weird, I have LGR in my followed channels list and I just realized "huh, I haven't seen a video recommended in the longest time, well time to see if there's any good looking oddwares since I last watched."
I like the transition from monitor view to capture view! Nice touch!
The falcon/mouse analogy goes several steps further than they originally considered.
A falcon is more exciting to look at, but there are far fewer out in the wild and they are far more expensive to acquire for yourself.
And this particular falcon is extinct in the wild and almost so in captivity.
Also falcons are generally associated more with air to air predation
@@AgentTasmania Isn't that just the F-16 Fighting Falcon? Or does that also apply to actual falcons?
@@Stoney3K It very much applies to real falcons too. The peregrine falcon is the fastest bird in the world, reaching speeds in excess of 200 miles an hour when diving on prey. With said prey mostly consisting of other birds, which it takes out in flight. It is basically a cruise missile made of meat.
32:51 I think this is the most joy I've seen you get out of an Oddware. Almost like something briefly lived up to the hype in our minds when we see stuff like this in PCGamer and just dream.
That's because the hardware was shockingly good, it's just the implementation was lacking. It needs well made software to take full advantage of it AND it needs a better mounting solution.
When I worked as an engineer for a design firm in 1999 I actually tested out that Phantom Haptic Interface using an early 3D sculpting app similar to what Z-Brush eventually became. The idea was to use it for industrial design and make the process of interfacing with the computer more "natural" to create 3D models. It was early, and obviously had it's clunks, and given the price, the company didn't adopt it, but it was cool to see.
Thank you LGR for featuring this!!! I was in my late teens when I actually walked into a MicroCenter in Cincinnati and found one of these on display, I had no idea the make / model. All I knew, they had it attached to gaming PC with some titles that were compatible, and I thought it was pretty cool! Granted, this pricetag for me at the time would've been way too high to consider, but I did enjoy the hour or so I spent on that demo PC. Ah, this one hits me right in the nostalgia. Thanks again LGR
Damn rare to see Clint outright losing it . The last time I remember he was this much in hysterics was an ancient Train Simulator gameplay video.
There was a time when he was reviewing something else, and while watching some videos, the XP screensaver popped up with the word "Penis" or something lol.
or that more recent Photoshop neural filters video from 2020 (on his Blerbs channel).
Also the Creative DVD card video
OH MAN I REMEMBER THESE! I’m so glad you’re doing a review. Teenage me was furious he couldn’t afford one.
Had one of these back in the day to experiment with on Source games. Interesting idea, but also a prime example of “be careful what you wish for” . Even though it added an interesting tactile experience for shooters, it made games like HL2 significantly more difficult even on easy mode, because the ability to have precise mouse-like accuracy was almost nonexistent.
I played doom 3 on it, and it was extremely immersive.. I don't think I can even play doom 3 without my no vint.. Imagine no vint + vr headset
I always really appreciate the historical aspects of these videos. LGR Tech Tales light.
This kept happening all through the 90s and 00s: Someone comes up with a weird peripheral device that's interesting enough to make it into some news shows and magazines. Some early adopter types buy it. The device, at best, works okay with the supplied demo software and maybe one or two games whose developers agreed to add support for it, however it's an afterthought at best. And that's it. If it's a really good idea, the technology gets bought and integrated into something that has nothing to do with the PC enthusiast market.
I mean, that never really stopped happening. That stupid GameScent device only came out a few months ago
And if they get popular enough for a cult following then they live on with aftermarket mods.
I'm getting flashbacks to the Razer Wii knockoff motion controllers
@@slicknicdwyerThe idea has been reused? I remember reading about something like that in the late 2000s.
I was at a gameconvention in Sweden ages ago where there was a booth where they had VR podracing game using two of these for the controlls.
The nostalgia i felt when you opened the tutorial software almost made me cry it was so intense. That 2000's "we know youre in a dark room" vibe. God i miss it man, everything today is so bright and mood-less.
it crazy to believe that i have watched you for 7 years now. i have my second job and remember your earlier videos like cozy childhood videos.
I just love how he just has a RED DOT chillin in the background to test fit to the pistol grip
26:49 might be the reason why.
You really had me in the first half, man. I followed this thing like CRAZY back in the day - There was a huge belief that the "Nintendo Revolution" would use some sort of input like this for a while. So glad someone made a great video about how this worked. Thanks and thanks to the person who let you make a video with theirs!
That actually looks usable, unlike so many other oddware things
Seeing your comment during
the mini-games section
had me like 👁👄👁
It was a genuinely really good piece of hardware for the time. It came out during the 08 recession, and wasn't marketed well at all.
The journalist from gamespot went full Beavis and Butthead whem asked where this device will be most useful for🤣 seriously, being able to feel feel fur is quite amazing.
I mean it was the 2000s kinda par for the course with gaming journalism.
I thought one of the demos would have fur.. probably would have been furry balls though
That was Tor Thorson. He was an absolute legend and sadly died 3 years ago
@@MarkDellohh, RIP to him.
@@k0lpAsame here
This is easily one of the coolest pieces of oddware I've ever seen on this channel. So glad you got to review one of these! I didn't even know they existed until right now. 🤯
I hate that I sometimes make presumptions about people, but LGR recognizing a striker fire pistol warmed my heart a little bit.
Same
The plague of 90s and 00s Oddware is that some great ideas were come up with, but nobody knew how to use them. Just some of the spitball ideas at the end of this video were probably beyond what devs 15 and 20 years ago were thinking about. Those minigames are a prime example. They had no idea how to properly utilize this thing. Force feedback in a shooter is cool and all, but an exploration game where feeling an object in realtime could help you solve a puzzle is a prime use case for this thing. Imagine a VR game where you could feel the texture of an object you were holding. That's not something we're even close to emulating right now and if this thing could somehow, someway be incorporated into a VR setup, how great could things be? (I know, it's probably far too bulky to ever work, it's just a thought experiment.)
This also happened to land at the rise of the keyboard and mouse mafia. Suddenly, like almost overnight, a lot of PC gamers were very militant about how a keyboard and mouse was the perfect input device and no one had ever used anything else and stop trying to turn their computers into dumb Nintendo toys.
It was a very strange and very abrupt shift in the market. A lot of neat input devices died, even well-established ones, as they fell in the sights of the "real men only use mice" gang. Even the venerable joystick went from a common peripheral to persona non grata quite rapidly.
Tangentally, this is actually considered the main reason that Freespace 2 bombed horribly, despite how popular Freespace had been. Freespace 1 had given a lot of sticks a good workout, and then suddenly no one had a joystick(or anything but disdain for one). The game played like warm poop without one, because flying a space ship with a mouse sucks.
@@CptJistuceit may be connected with two things; firstly, it's the development of hardware, which led to better visuals which led to popularity of FPS genre and, in general, action games from first and third person (to think of it, there was a time when epic and cool games were RTS, like C&C!..), and secondly, a trend of those FPS getting more and more competitive.
@@strakhovandrri The FPS had already exploded. And that had led to the birth of Descent, which was very much a joystick-first game. And Freespace rode in on Descent's reputation(initially being titled "Descent: Freespace")
Hell yeah. I have one of these. Bought it in 2013. I have the ball and the pistol grip. The haptic feedback really blew me away with Half-Life 2. I was in college at the time and I brought it to my microcomputer maintenance class and showed it off. The recoil impulse would change with different weapons, picking up different objects felt like you were holding something with relatively similar substance. The grip is modeled after a Walther P99. That is why it is so comfortable.
One thing that was really interesting was doing 3D modeling. I think 3DS max supported it and it was really intuitive to use.
At my university one of the labs had one of pen-style controllers you show in the beginning. That demo has always stuck around with me - squishing the rubber ball and writing on different kinds of paper/plastic felt so amazingly realistic.
It would make a pretty sick car shifter if you put it on its back. Could mimic every shifter ever made
I was a 3d modeling student back when 3d sculpting started becoming a ting, and I distinctly remember drooling over similar devices, not for gaming, but for sculpting.
I had one of these! This was the next best thing to VR back in the day. Great for 3D modeling and sculpting too!
23:39 Clint wins the world record for the best reaction to getting a strike.
to paraphrase, "If I had a penny for every time a CAD input device got reworked into a gaming controller, I'd have tuppence; which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice."
It's enough to feed those flying rats
what's the other one?
@@NeoTechni the SpaceOrb
But they're always intentionally bad because they need to make something that people will actually buy but just useless enough not to compete with their professional product with ultra-wide margins. Although this looks mostly OK, but suffers all of the usual problems. Poor drivers/software, no public SDK or code or documentation and nobody ends up using it.
I use my SpaceMouse for games like Elite Dangerous, and that basically just works out of the box. You have to either set the joystick axis manually or copy a config someone else made off a forum, but it works wonderfully when you do.
Got the idea from The Expanse, in the TV series they use a spacemouse as the control stick in the cockpit.
I had one of these back in the day. Super cool device! The support in the Penumbra games was really wild - you could enter a '3D object interaction' mode to interact with and move objects. I distinctly remember pushing against a soft-body mattress and feeling the Falcon push back against my hand like a spring.
0:14 Hey...Clint...it's the shirt! Thanks for wearing of The Forgotten Machines!!!!! There never was any doubt, but you ARE just that much more a truly AWESOME guy! And appropriately for an LGR Oddware episode...you sure picked a weird one this time... Love it!
Finally unpacked the last bin of goodies from VCF Midwest, I’m awful at putting that stuff off 😅
It was great hanging out a bit more at Southwest, by the way.
@@LGR Indeed it was! So cool!!!
No big surprise that Valve was the only company putting actual effort in making this work so well with their game, down to all the smallest details.
Until they turned to shit. Half life alyx is awesome but that's all for the last decade. Seriously, it goes Portal 2 - Alyx with only shit inbetween. Valve is dead.
@@Nereosis16 fu them they the made a game for VR only , it's a joke it is like making game for smarpthones only
@@WildBeret if you ever get to play it you will see why it's VR only. It's a masterpiece.
@@WildBeretthey do make games for smartphones only, numbnuts
@@Nereosis16they "turned to shit" by making a "masterpiece"? Get your story straight.
Watching Clint leading a feudal host at gunpoint is hilarious.
I respect the amount of research you do for these videos, you uncover so much depth for such odd items.
Totally agree, I love how much depth he gets into.
We had a demo for this at a LAN party I attended during this time. As I recall it had really decent support for left 4 dead as well. They even sent some units to give away as LAN prizes. I'm sure there's still lan attendees that still have them.
I got to use this at a trade show before it was out for the public to buy and was absolutely blown away by it! It's such a cool piece of tech to use and I was hoping we would see more of it once it was released. But instead it became an incredibly obscure item. Playing Half-Life 2 with this was awesome, but what I really loved was the demo where you went through different viscosity things, like maple syrup, vs water.
When those basketballs were flying everywhere all I could think of is “BOMBARDMENT!”
Hey Clint.
I still have my Falcon from 2008. Actually, that's not true. I originally purchased a white one, but after about six months, one of the servos stopped working properly. I contacted customer support and sent some log files, and they agreed to send me a new unit, so long as I destroyed the old one. When the new one came, it was black instead of white. I took my old unit out to my front porch and smashed it with a hammer, then sent them photos. They were shocked to see how much I'd destroyed it. The replacement is the one I still have.
Supposedly Novint gave Valve a whole bunch of Falcons to make native support for Source games happen, and they did make it happen, but those units were later discovered in a dumpster outside Valve HQ. So the legend goes.
I played Penumbra with it. I think the installer was linked in an email after I registered the product. It was a specific installer for the HaptX version of the game, which is why your versions didn't work. I'm sure it's available somewhere in an archive. It was one of the most immersive games available, because your "hand" was represented in 3D space, and you could move it around, similar to how you moved it around in the ball demo. This allowed you to feel the walls, open doors, and do a number of other things with your virtual hand. It was pretty cool.
I got fairly good with the Falcon in TF2, and really enjoyed it for what it was, as I played on my crappy Windows 7 laptop with a dual-core CPU, integrated graphics and 4 gigs of RAM.
You'd think VR would be great with this, but as you said earlier, the problem is that it's not a 6 DOF device. In VR, you want to be able to move your hand(s) freely and in any direction, and the Falcon doesn't allow you to do that. In fact, it's extra weird, because the Falcon would control your head. Imagine you're in VR, and to look around, you have to move your entire arm, and you can't exactly look in any direction. I think it would lead to major motion sickness.
I swear I saw Jamie from Mythbusters using something like this in his office for 3d modeling.
I remember that! It wasn't Jamie but it was one of the M5 employees who was using it to model Kari's behind for the mold for the airplane toilet suction one. It was basically one of the pilots.
I recall a pen-like device they used to model a butt for the "sucked to an airplane toilet" myth, is that the one you were referring to?
Oh hi Lexi! What're you doing here at this computer hardware related video? Sarcasm!
Good memory! It was being sucked into the airplane toilet seat myth. They took a 3D scan of Kari Byron's bum, then Kari used the 3D mouse to build up the size of her bum for making a rubber casting mold.
Probably used by Jamie in another episode, but I remember Kari's bum well!
I think there's a lot of these kind of weird input devices in ealy CGI, like the dinosaur input device from Jurassik Park
Wow thanks for looking at such a crazy device. I remember seeing this at Tiger Direct eons ago and every few years the concept of it would pop back in my brain, but could never figure out what the device was, leading me to believe it was something I had imagined as a kid.
I hope you never stop making content ❤
Man, this thing SCREAMS 00s computer tech.
Exactly the type of stuff you'd drool over at the Sharper Image
It's like they designed the product around the ball demo. It's such a specific use case.
You can see in the beginning of the video what this tech is for. Medical and engineering industries. They just attempted to adapt it to the video game market
its like the power glove all over again
you can feel textures. i can only think of nsfw usecases
@@brulsmurf YUP!
@@leftyfourguns True, good point. it looks very enterprise!
Hey Clint, play Infra with this, it's based on portal 2's version of the source engine. It is a first person adeventure game from 2015/16 made by finnish developers. It's theme is urbax, abandones places, tech-y puzzles and cold war cloak and dagger stuff.
Despite knowing full well that Clint has a high end PC for editing and modern gaming aside, it still feels like whiplash to see it on this channel :)
This is by far your best video jeez I laughed so much
Didn't expect to see a live bear on LGR
I think this is the first time I've seen Cliff let slip his firearms interest in an LGR video.
hes from the south. its burned into us here
@@cal2127 I thought he was from NC. Wait, is NC part of "the South"? I dunno, I'm not an American.
@@tbdaemon yes, it is part of the south east
@@cal2127not everyone.
@@tbdaemon If they were in the Confederacy they're in the South. It's not complicated
This feels like it might have been a few years too early. VR would be pretty neat with this.
Wrong. It would be TERRIBLE for VR as its action is confined to a TINY position of 3D space on a desk. 🤷 A 6DOF VR controller with high end LIM haptics like Meta's Touch Pro controllers is a better VR control solution than something like this in basically every way imaginable. What you lose in force feedback you gain in proper wide area 6DOF maneuverability (unlike the MINISCULE like 6" area of 6DOF control a Novint Falcon provides).
@Cooe
Calm down.
@@Cooe. You haven't seen those hentai VR games it seems lol.
@@GoldSrc_ Those games would still be infinitely better with some kind of 6DOF haptic gloves than anything like this. This must be stationary on a desk w/ very limited range of motion technology simply doesn't make sense for VR. 🤷
I actually made the menu you are looking at for the HL2 mod for the settings. It was one of my first jobs. I was 14 at the time and they found me through my modding community. Amazing experience!
Wow that’s awesome!
This thing is miles ahead of what I was expecting. It would be awesome in an arcade.
not at all, in an arcade you expect to actually aim with it, not just use a handle to move a cursor around.
I hope that one day LGR will review the "UNION REALITY HEAD MASTER" one of the most obscure and strange PC gaming controllers ever, which used the same technology as the wiimote years before the wiimote
Seems like a plug-and-play version of stuff like trackIR, neat!
That looks like a one-way ticket to neck injury.
That's a heck of a combination of words to name it.
Clint has such a contagious laugh. That bowling ball really did ascend to a higher plane of existence!
This is one of those devices that lives or dies on it's implementation, and Valve did it masterfully with HL2.
Knew these existed, but never knew how cool the HL2 implementation was.
Man I replayed half life 2 so many times, but playing half life 2 with the novint falcoln was something else
Feels really analogous to VR in general. Incredibly impressive demos, obvious wealth of potential, but very very few games/apps that properly utilize it.
I was interning with a company in the very early 00's and they had this in to demo one day, and the app they had loaded for us was a clay sculpting program. In that use case it felt pretty real and at the time the demo was quite impressive.
@4:14 "I know what you're thinking about you can use this for, why don't you tell us?"
*nervous laughter*
"No!"
Comedy gold.
I bet my mother would love this device. She would use it in all sort of ways.
No more dishwashing by hand!
Freud would be interest hearing more about your fantasies concerning your mother.
There's a "your mom" joke here somewhere...
ways.....:)
no more wrist cramps while masterbaiting
i mean... if you attached a T product to it.... you could use it too. lol.
Giggity intro.
Ha I had exactly the same reaction 👍
Who else but Quagmire? 🤷
It’s a “personal massager” folks 😊
definitely remember seeing threads online about people buying these second hand in the mid-late 2010's and making custom "end plates" and code for these to drive them like that.
Maybe they could have saved their company if someone had come up with a fleshlight attachment for it 😂
Thanks!
That's got to be one of the greatest Oddware video intros ever. Hell, maybe even greatest video intro ever overall. ROFLMAO. Bravo Clint!
This honestly operates as a good in-between of vr and desktop play. That recoil absolutely made the concept awesome to me
the subtitles are such fun!! "spherical laughter" "chuckle of immaturity"
"If you wanna touch some other balls, you can do that. There are a lot of balls!" lol. No comment.
Never would have suspected a guy reviewing retro computer accessories might be mauled by a bear at some point.
It's better not to think about it. I would rather not mama bear maul our favorite reviewer.
Netscape dad hat goes hard
The demo I saw at Fry's Electronics had a "sand" sphere and it blew my mind feeling the the texture as you pushed the cursor through the ball. Always been tempted to grab on of these just for the hell of it, possibly for CAD work.
The recoil effect sounds genuinely cool, but it's such a limited use-case and as impressive as the device is, looks extremely impractical. It'd be cool if there was a more practical way to achieve the effect. Very interesting video!
I remember this! Arma, Crysis, and so many other games went so far as to explicitly add support for this neat little tool.
I remember really wanting one, but could never find one in my area :C