When I first met Philip Rosedale , he told me the story of Linden Lab’s first year in business. Most of the effort that year (1999/2000) was spent building something fondly known as “The Rig”. It was a haptic device, designed to allow users to walk around a virtual environment and interract with it using not only their senses of sight and sound, but also their sense of touch. Eventually, Philip and the gang realized that while the Rig was lots of fun, it was commercially uninteresting because there was no place to go and use it. So they decided that the market opportunity was to build that place. And so Second Life was born.

Well here we are 6 years later. Broadband penetration has increased dramatically. Video games’ sales have surpassed the Hollywood’s domestic box office figures. And Second Life has 370,000 residents. The time is ripe for haptics, and a company has emerged that may well be able to produce a compelling two-way haptic controller for the consumer market for around $100. That company is Novint and the product is known as the Novint Falcon.

Now the hard part: describing something that works on such a visceral and kinesthetic level in words. Before I first demo’ed the Falcon, I spent a long time telling my friend all about why the peripherals business was a terrible one. He simply nodded patiently and said, “Just try it out”. He then sat me down at the machine and took me through a simple demo. For the first time in my life, I was able to feel objects in virtual space, to push them, stretch them, manipulate them, all in beautiful, natural, rich detail. The pixels suddenly came alive. After I peeled my jaw off the floor, I realized that this product was going to change the way we all live in a fundamental and beautiful way. In fact, it really is the Second Half of Second Life.

I had a similar epiphany when I first saw Second Life: despite the lack of aesthetic polish, it seemed clear that the openness of the platform and the leverage that openness provided made this a “game-changing” product. Novint is the same way: once you touch a virtual object and feel it’s physical contours, you’ll never quite think about virtual reality the same way again. Because an avatar suddenly goes from something quite exciting (a “representation” of somebody in virtual space) to something mindblowing (a palpable representation of somebody”). And the degree to which this shrinks distance between us even further, the way it enhances the experience, is truly amazing.

There are currently only 8 Novint Falcons in the world, but the company is planning to produce several thousand in the next few months and have them widely commercially available by mid 2007. I can’t wait.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 5th, 2006 at 6:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.