After leaving Razer’s meeting room thoroughly impressed with what they had to offer, we ventured over to the Sands expo to hit some of the companies we missed the day before. It was an unexpected pleasure to stumble across a company called Novint Technologies, Inc. Chances are good, in fact, chances are illegally good that you have never heard of Novint. However, with the product they were showing at CES in their repertoire, you will be hearing about them sometime soon. That time is now. Novint Technologies had what is easily the most well designed innovative gaming peripheral I have ever seen. Companies often try to enter the gaming peripheral market with some “innovative” product that lacks user friendliness almost as much as it does practicality. Novint’s Falcon is a dramatic step away from this trend and is in our humble opinion, worthy of all acclaim it has received so far, including the Showcase Award for Design & Engineering from Innovations here at the 2007 International CES.


The Novint Falcon is a nifty looking device that has several motors and arms and pulleys and stuff and its like really cool dude. It is an extremely complicated mechanical and electrical device that is meant to simulate real world resistance and reaction when navigating different environments within games. For instance, if you were moving your hand through a big blob of molasses, the Falcon provides resistance as you do so. If you were to run your hand over a bumpy surface, the Falcon will adapt to that surface and be bumpy and stuff. We really aren’t doing a very good job at explaining it, because it is something that is tremendously difficult to explain correctly. However, experiencing realistic recoil in first person shooter games is something that can be explained very easily in just one word: awesome. The Falcon controller delivers a kick back force with every gun shot, and the magnitude of this blast is dependent on the gun being fired.

The only catch to this device is that you actually need to be using it with special software for the full experience. This software is what is called the Haptic Engine – the Falcon is a Haptic controller – that integrates into games. Novint Technologies had created a Half-Life 2 modification called Haptic-Life 2 that has full integration with the Haptic engine. The experience is absolutely amazing and one in which everyone should partake. The ball-shaped controller shown in the pictures is the standard one, but the contollers are attached to the device via a quick-release system and can easily be swapped out for different ones. For instance, if I was playing a first person shooter, I would probably swap out the ball for a pistol-grip controller of some sort. It is really really cool. Really cool.