San Francisco, CA
Lunar Design Partners with Novint Technologies and Force Dimension to Introduce the
Novint Falcon – Limited Edition Falcon Bundle Available June 18th, 2007
CES Innovation Honoree, the Novint Falcon, a High-Fidelity, Three Dimensional Interactive
Touch Device for the Home PC Launches This Summer
April, 2007 -- Lunar Design, a twenty two-year old world leader in creating successful, memorable products, is proud to announce its work on the Novint Falcon, a groundbreaking high-fidelity interactive 3D touch controller which Novint (NVNT) is now launching as a limited release in June of this year. Lunar spearheaded the industrial design and engineering to help bring this innovative product to market, working closely with Novint and commercial haptic developer, Force Dimension. The Novint Falcon is the first 3D touch device developed for the consumer market and lets users feel weight, shape, texture, dimension, and force effects when playing touch-enabled PC games.
Novint is currently taking pre-orders for the limited edition Novint Falcon at a one time price point of $189. The Falcon will ship June 18th, 2007. Additional games will be available at launch, including standalone and microgames from Newton’s Monkey Business, and drivers for Half-Life 2, which let users feel weapon weight, recoil and other game interactions.
The team’s work on the Falcon was recognized with a CES 2007 Innovations Honoree Award in the electronic gaming category, presented by the independently juried International CES Innovations Design and Engineering Awards.
"Sophisticated 3D touch technology is currently only used in high-end markets, such as medical training, perceptual research and virtual CAD assembly," said Jeff Smith, CEO of Palo Alto, California based Lunar Design. "The Falcon makes this high performance 3D touch technology available to the video game industry."
Lunar and their project partners successfully met the challenge of designing a product specifically for the video game industry. To bring the Falcon’s sophisticated level of 3D touch technology to this consumer market, Lunar applied their creativity and ingenuity to solve key technical, aesthetic, and cost challenges. Based on the existing engineering Novint licensed from Force Dimension, a leading Swiss developer of high-end haptic devices, Lunar reinvented the technology’s robotics to be produced within cost efficient manufacturing processes that met Novint’s aggressive cost targets.
Aesthetically, Lunar designed the device to engage the video game industry with an appealing form and look. They created a vortex-like configuration and appearance to minimize size and also make the device visually distinctive.
The compact and visually unique configuration creates flexibility for the customer. The final design works well within a variety of environments, such as the living room, the home office or a gaming enthusiast’s bedroom. Lunar’s design for the Falcon’s appearance can appeal to those with a taste for sleek design or it can also take on the personality of a more radical gamer look This capability to manifest a variety of appearances helps the design take on the character of the differently branded manufacturing and marketing partners that will likely license the device from Novint.
A final goal for Lunar was to design and engineer the Falcon to accommodate a variety of controller grips, called end effectors. These end effectors allow users to more accurately engage with the experience of the game they are playing, such as feeling their stroke when they hit the golf ball on screen, or gauging how much edge they get on their snow boards as they fly down the slopes.
Walter Aviles, CTO and Vice President of Engineering for Novint said, "Lunar has done a remarkable job leading the industrial design and preproduction engineering efforts on the Novint Falcon. Their work, together with the contribution of our other partner, Force Dimension, has resulted in a truly innovative and remarkable product that lets Novint bring high-fidelity 3D touch to the consumer market for the first time. It is a pleasure working with Lunar Design, who brought incredible experience and insight to the project. We look forward to our ongoing relationship."
About Lunar Design
Lunar creates winning consumer, technology and medical products that make a difference to its clients’ stakeholders, brands and markets. With a portfolio of highly successful products that have generated tens of billions of dollars in sales, Lunar has consistently held a spot among the top 5 award-winning industrial design firms for the last 10 years, according to Business Week magazine. Founded in 1984, Lunar provides full-service product development with offices in California, Hong Kong, and Europe. Lunar’s current and past clients include Apple Computer, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft Corporation, Motorola, Philips, Oral-B, Palm, Pepsi, and Sony.
For press information contact:
Amy Cunha
amy@bigpicpr.com
415-626-3333
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