I suppose it's about time I discussed this. I'm sure a lot of you will have heard me make reference to a device known as "the Falcon" recently. I have this device on loan from the university as part of my fourth year project.

The Falcon is supposedly (we'll get to that) a Next-Generation Games Controller. It's a haptics device, some that attempts to bring touch sensation into games. Despite all the literature hailing it as a revolution in gaming, it's been around for a good two years now and nobody seems to care.

You can read all the press here, but don't trust them: http://www.novint.com

My project is to create a virtual route planner for visually impaired users; basically, we want to generate a 3D environment matching a route in the real world that the user can explore using the Falcon as a virtual white stick. Which is pretty cool, because as a games controlled the Falcon is useless.

I've got the Falcon for my project because it's been sitting around and never used. They prefer another haptic device, the Phantom, which seems to have been around a lot longer. The Falcon is interesting for a number of reasons -- it's only $189, making it affordable against a Phantom's $1000+, and it can actually generate more force than the cheapest Phantom. Something like 8.89 newtons of force rather than 3, if I remember from the lecture notes.

It can do this at the cost of the available workspace. The Falcon is basically a nodule on the end of three awkwardly arranged robot arms, meaning that instead of getting a regular square or hemispherical workspace or something else easily comprehensible, you get a very annoying polygon. When you're feeling your way around some of the demo programs, you quite often find it resisting you because the arms just won't go any further in the direction you want them to.

One of our current concerns is navigation. While the Falcon acts as the white stick, how do you move the Falcon's workspace around the 3D world? My initial thought was the arrow keys, but if you can't see the screen to orientate yourself -- well, that's no help. Another idea is making the white stick also carry you forward as you push the Falcon's boundaries, which is perhaps better because you'd feel the ground moving under you. But that might also be really awkward, if you're trying to feel an object in front of you and suddenly you're barrelling off around it.

Anyway, to try and narrow down the problem, I decided to investigate how the Falcon was applied to some real computer games. Hurr hurr.

Reason 1 why the Falcon has never taken off: of all the games that support it, I only own one. Quake 4.

It supports a number of first-person shooters, mostly Half-Life 2-based ones. However, the bulk of its support is an array of casual games that you've never heard of. It does not support any Unreal Engine games, which seems like a glaring omission to me. No strategies, no RPGs (not that I can imagine the control setup for those).

Naturally, since I have only recently finished Quake II, I felt drawn back to Quake 4 anyway -- and what better way to experience the game than with force feedback?

Reason 2 why the Falcon has never taken off: it's fucking useless as a games controller.

Yep. It could just be that the Q4 support is rubbish. But taking that as gospel, this is how the Falcon operates in an FPS.

It's implemented as a 2D pointing device -- up and down, left and right to point, leaving the depth for force-feedback. The main issue, however, is that the world of a first-person shooter is infinite, whereas the workspace of the Falcon is extremely finite. When you have a mouse, you can lift it up and shunt it back to the centre of your mat; stuff your ergonomic or intuitive balls, it works and it feels natural. The Falcon cannot do this, so you're often left with the natural centre of the workspace being in completely the wrong place. Turning corners is a bitch, but since the Falcon does handle horizontal rotation, supplementing it with the arrow keys would relegate it to purely vertical duties. Not a solution, after the cash you've forked out for this intricate device.

Rotation beyond the workspace occurs when you push to the edge; it resists you, and slowly pulls the view round. Push harder, it resists harder, and you spin round like a maniac. Maybe I have the sensitivity up too high, but I need that for when I'm pointing properly in the thing's normal workspace.

Particularly nasty were the vehicle sequences. These are a low point in Quake 4 at the best of times, but with the Falcon...

If you think you can't aim as a normal soldier, the vehicle sequences are insane. I ended up just holding it in place for the truck-mounted gunning parts, because it is absolutely dreadful. The big problem is when you want to point at enemies that have run in close -- pointing the gun right down is mostly impossible, because the workspace doesn't extend that far down. The game at this point is meant to limit you, but combining that with the limits of the Falcon makes a bit of a mess. Especially when you can't get it to the bottom of the workspace to try and shunt the natural centre back to the centre of the workspace.

The hovertank was even worse. The Falcon didn't know if it was controlling the turret or jolting you around over the terrain underneath you. Again, the limited up and down of the tank guns made aiming a disaster. Thank goodness I have it on easy mode.

The verdict: I like force-feedback.

I always loved rumble packs, and always will. What the Falcon does to Quake 4 that really works is force-feedback. You're not feeling the walls, but you are feeling the judder of your machine-gun, the huge jolt of the shotgun. Reloading was also a nice touch -- the machine gun clicks a whole clip in, but the shotgun snicks for eight individual shells as they go into the gun. It's cool.

Will I buy a Falcon when my project is over?

No. As I said, it's fucking useless as an FPS controller. Not to mention it's pretty capricious -- it will spontaneously switch itself off, and the manual doesn't actually explain what the blue, green or red lights actually mean. I've sort of worked out that blue is all good, green is wiggle me about until I turn blue, and red is something went wrong but I can't tell you what. But it would have been nice if the manual, you know, explained that?

I may not be able to aim with the mouse any more, but the Falcon (like the analgoue stick before it (cue massive raaaaaaaage)) is not the answer to all the world's game-interaction problems. It's just too awkward.

For a blind person wanting to explore a virtual world, however, the Falcon seems like a good, solid, affordable solution to the problem.

But then again, we'll only know for sure once my project is finished. Hurrrrrr.