Novint Falcon Pistol Grip

[Chief]

https://home.novint.com/store/promote.php

Has anyone used one of these? They just announced that they have support for all Valve titles, as well as a bunch of other games, including the Battlefield series, F.E.A.R, Crysis, Need for Speed (don't know how that would work )

full list of games with support (& upcoming support) here.

Interesting concept, and looks fun to use, I just wonder if it provides much more accuracy than a mouse.

[Drac]

Looks way too overdesigned to me.

A friend of mine is an industrial designer and he always harps on about technology evolving away form moving/mechanical parts as being a good thing such as ball mice to optical/laser mice, CDs/DVDs/HDDs to solid state memory ect and so on - less movable parts typically means the technology will be more sustainable, and sustainable/green tech is becoming more and more necessary nowadays. In that regard this looks like a giant leap backwards.

Also, I've worked a fair bit with haptic devices in the past. Shortly after I graduated I spent several years working on a number of installations and various projects dealing with haptic feedback and input - gesture based devices with acceletometers (way before the Wii), vibration devices you strapped to yourself (seriously, was weird stuff, some of it even involved pink latex) even some really way out there full body interactive works where you laid back on this 70 degree shelf and used your feet and back to interact with stuff. I even exhibited some full body motion capture stuff back in 2003 (no where near as advanced as advanced as the Natal, but similar). Some of it was kinda cool, and it was defiantly fun to work on, but one thing I took away form it all was that when you try to simulate things too closely you risk approaching this paradox whereby the closer you get to the real thing the more it feels unnatural. Kinda like the uncanny valley effect in computer graphics where you start to get near human motion and visuals but not quite and it all feels wrong and kinda creepy.

Perhaps that was just a result of the stuff I worked on, but since then I've always though that abstract interactions are sufficient for most things. Some times it works with things like driving wheels for games yet driving with a wheel and foot peddles is a pretty abstract form of controlling motion to begin with - when you start trying to simulate bodily interactions I'd approach with caution and healthy skepticism.

[Reoh]

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I miss my old "duck hunt" console gun. I want one for playing FPS'!

I don't want to be motion captured, my lazy ass wants to be game playing with my butt nicely cushioned in a cost chair!