I’m not really used to writing about hardware that’s hardly to prototype stage yet, but damn, I cannot wait ‘til this comes out so I can start reverse engineering it.

Novint, the company that manufacturers the Falcon haptic device (that I wrote/maintain the cross-platform libnifalcon for - if you aren’t familiar with the falcon, check out this rather exhaustive article I wrote on it a couple of years ago), recently announced a merger with another company.

The other company in the deal, Forcetek Enterprises, doesn’t even seem to exist outside of the PR about this merger (UPDATE: Ok, I actually found their old website finally. Apparently this was shown at E3?). Successful stealth mode.

What came out of the merger…

is a partial exoskeleton for gaming.

The XIO is a sleeve exoskeleton that allows you to feel forces throughout the arm, versus just through the hand like the Novint Falcon. There is actuation along the arm and elbow, meaning much larger force distribution and a much more immersive feel. In applied terms, this means that you’ll be able to feel things like gun kickback all the way through your shoulder, versus just your hand. You can also do interesting things like simulating weight and fatigue in the arms by restricting certain movements.

This combined with depth cameras like the kinect could be HUGE. Players would have both full body tracking AND at least partial body actuation, which is better than the “flail without feedback” option we’ve had for years with the Power Glove/P5/Wiimote/Kinect/Move.

The demo video below shows a full VR rig built from consumer hardware, using

• Vuzix HMD
• XIO
• TNGames Third Space Vest (Which I also write drivers for!)
• Some new gun controller

The XIO is supposed to integrate with Novint’s F-Gen drivers. F-Gen is an abstract programmer layer (similar to GlovePIE) made to implement haptics on top of arbitrary games, instead of doing direct game integration (which Novint has with things like Source Engine games and the Penumbra series). This allows users to possibly script haptics to whatever game they want. How well this works, I have no idea, but it means that any game the falcon supports should also be supported by the XIO on release.

Novint’s yet again done a horrible job of the PR with this one, as it looks like no one has really picked up the news yet even though the press release happened over a week ago, and now all of the images on the front page of their site are broken. Novint’s CEO even changed his twitter account on the launch for reasons I’m not real sure of.

That said, I’ve been incredibly happy with Novint’s quality of engineering on the Falcon. Novint knows how to make extensible hardware, as they’ve shown with the grip and firmware system on the falcon. It was a joy to reverse engineer, and I’m hoping that follows onto this as well. I can’t wait to get my hands on (and in) the XIO.

Did some work this weekend on making np_epoc a little more usable, since v0.1 had VID/PID and encryption keys hardcoded to the headset I have.

VID/PID and key are now selectable by users. You can also get a device count to make sure you have the VID/PID pair set up correctly.

Hopefully key and ID detection will be done by emokit soon, but that’s going to take a little more work since we’re not yet sure how the key is deduced on connection.

Binaries are available on the sourceforge NP Labs release site. Currently I’ve only got OS X 10.6 Max 5 binaries up. Pd has been tested on linux, works fine, but the source package is… not the best at the moment, so I’ll hopefully have OS X and Linux Pd binaries up soon. I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to build the binaries for windows at all, since VS10 is giving me some problems against flext.

They say he who dies with the most maintainerships… dies very tired.

The emokit project, started by Daeken, aims to provide a free driver to access raw data coming from the Emotiv EPOC headset. However, he’s been really busy being awesome elsewhere lately, so after picking up the decode key for the special pre-release unit, writing a C implementation of the library, and fielding some support emails, I (Kyle) have finally just gone ahead and taken the lead maintainer role on the project.

Many thanks go to Daeken for the initial work on getting the library and community together, and hopefully he’ll come back to visit at some point.

The new main repo is at

http://www.github.com/qdot/emokit

Next big steps for the project are:

• Isolating the power level readings
• Finishing up and formalizing the C library
• Getting a full v0.1 release out

I also develop the np_epoc external for Max/Pd. I expect that I’ll be updating the external along with anything we get done with the headset itself, so keep an eye on that on my personal externals page.

It’s been a while since I’ve started up a new website, and I found myself doing enough work on health hardware that I decided to spin it out into its own site. Not to mention, there’s already a ton of drivers and software out there, but there’s been no central place to record it thus far. openyou.org will feature posts about open source health technology, as well as information on library and driver projects to give developers and users new ways to learn about themselves via code.

Hopefully I manage to keep it up a little better than I have here and slashdong lately, too.

As of last night, I got Windows, OS X, and Linux support working on the C version of libthirdspacevest for the The TN Games Third Space Vest, so now it seemed like a good idea to do my usual followup and make a Max/MSP and PureData external for it. So, there’s now a np_thirdspacevest repo, and matching binary distribution site on sourceforge. I’ve just released version 0.1, the source code and Max 5 external are on sourceforge. Will build more externals as I need them or as I get demand, but, well, I’ve managed to go from getting hardware to full cross platform drivers and libraries for 3 languages in the span of a week, so I’m just gonna sit here and feel proud of myself for the moment.