Novint - History

History

In 1995 Sandia National Laboratories, a United States government laboratory, bought one of the world's first commercial 3D haptic devices, and began developing haptic software. Sandia did core haptic research and research on how to use the technology for scientific visualization. It was one of the first companies in the world focused purely on the software side of the field of haptics. Anderson led the project at Sandia until 2000 at which point he founded Novint. Novint acquired an exclusive license to the technology and began to commercialize it.

Novint's vision was that the technology could fundamentally change computing, adding one of our most basic human senses and experiences to computers. Given this vision, Novint was originally focused on consumer applications, but quickly found itself in a situation where the dot com bubble was bursting and the markets were collapsing. Investments in 2001 were difficult to come by for an early stage company, so Novint focused its efforts on higher end professional applications.

Novint spent several years focusing on custom development for a variety of companies including Lockheed Martin, Chrysler, Chevron, Mobil, Aramco, Sandia National Laboratories, and Harvard University, among others.

In 2004, the cost of 3D haptic hardware was still very high, over $10,000. Novint felt that to again move towards the consumer space, it would need to develop a consumer level hardware device itself. Novint took on the daunting challenge of taking a $15,000 haptic device, licensed from its partner company Force Dimension, and turn that device into a consumer level device, robust enough for gamers, yet still have the fidelity to be used in surgical simulations.

By 2006 Novint had taken the expensive, high-end design, and working with Lunar Design, made a consumer level prototype. In June 2006, Novint went public on the OTC:BB under the ticker symbol NVNT. In late 2006, Novint put together a partnership with V-Tech to manufacture the Falcon in China.

At CES in 2007, Novint announced plans to launch the Novint Falcon as a consumer device, and on June 18, 2006 (Tom Anderson's 32nd birthday) Novint launched the world's first consumer 3D touch device, having effectively brought the cost of the hardware down two orders of magnitude (1/100 of the original cost).

At that point in time, Novint had a strong hardware solution, but felt that it needed better game support, which is currently one of the main focuses of the company. In May 2008, Novint made an agreement with Electronic Arts to license 7 AAA game titles. Novint then signed licensing agreements with other publishers and developers, including Valve Software.

In June 2009 Valve released updates to Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2 adding game support for the Novint Falcon.

In December 2009, Novint launched the first beta version of F-Gen, a tool which allowed mouse-like use of the Falcon in Windows. The program also included a scripting functionality that theoretically allowed users to integrate the Falcon into practically any game.

In February 2010, Novint launched their second Beta version of their F-Gen software, integrating their proprietary G-cube functionality. Later that same month they released a small dll patch to fix a bug that had emerged in the button functionality. Both the beta and the patch were released only on the Novint forums.