Halflife2.net grip design contest

Hello everyone, we just finished our judging of the Halflife2.net grip design contest. I’d like to start by thanking Halflife2.net for having us get more involved in their community – We’ve known it as a great site for years, and have recently gotten more involved with the community myself. It has great, intelligent guys running the site, and it is a group we’re very excited to be working with. We’d like to do more event and contests with them in the future.

In the contest, we asked entrants to design a Novint Falcon grip (or handle), to be used with the Novint Falcon. We judged the designs on design appeal and practicality (particularly for where we are in our business, and what we are looking to do), value to end users, aesthetic appeal, effort, and presentation. There were many strong entries – more than I thought we would get. The quality and thought put into them was more than I envisioned as well, so judging was harder than I thought it would be, and people overall did a great job.

In the end, we decided on five honorable mentions, one runner up, and one winner.

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order):

Entry from Mooodan
Moodan’s design was a machine gun type of grip. The reason we liked this one so much was that we felt it captured the spirit of what many people would really like to have in shooters. Novint spends a lot of time on message boards, and we listen to a lot of people’s feedback. Moodan’s design had a lot of detail in it that echoed what many others have described they want to see – this one stood out for the gamer’s perspective and ideas it had. The main issue we see in this design is that it is bulky and could break fairly easily, particularly at the interface to the Falcon. We would have liked to see a description of how the grip could practically attach to the Falcon (e.g. using some type of release system where the handle would come off without damage if tweaked the wrong way). Overall, well done.

Entry from kgwhipp
kgwhipp's design was a non-gaming use of the Falcon, and was particularly insightful as to what the Falcon can do. In essence, the Falcon is a robot, and therefore the handle can be moved and controlled by an application. Kgwhipp’s design took advantage of this fact, and the grip attachment he designed therefore creates a low cost 3D scanner, in which you can scan objects into 3D models into your computer by moving a sensor attached to the Falcon. The presentation on his design was excellent. This is a practical, realistic design that a real business could be developed around. In that sense in particular, it was one of the best submissions. It was an excellent submission, and definitely one of our favorites.

Entry from The Cake is a Pie (his steam name)
The Cake is a Pie’s entry was a grip similar to a pistol grip, however, he designed the buttons to be on the top rather than the sides. Our first impression was that it looked like a great design, but there was some concern that it could have ergonomic issues. However, upon looking further into the presentation, we saw that a real physical clay prototype was developed. That is one of the key efforts in good grip design, and seeing it in his hand showed that ergonomics was both considered, and potentially a feature of the design. Prototypes are critical to this type of design process, and we were impressed with the effort, so this entry was easy to choose as an honorable mention.

Entry from Marler
Marler’s entry was a pistol grip design, with a very classic and stylistic handle. One insight we feel this design has, is in the fact that many different pistol grips can be developed over time, and tailored to specific games. I think this type of grip has a strong place in our longer term line-up, which we envision will include a variety of pistol grip designs, many tailored to specific games. The presentation and drawing, hand drawn and neat and clean, was impressive. Several of the specific design features could be applied across a variety of games. Great design and entry.

Entry from Terrox
Terrox’s entry was funny, and a very clean and well done presentation. We Falconers love Team Fortress 2, as well. It was so well done, we thought it deserved a mention ;)

Runner up:
Entry from Lone Wolf
Lone Wolf’s entry was a pistol grip with a variety of features. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this for us, was the resemblance to prototypes we have done using professional designers. The way the back of the pistol grip is shorter resembles physical prototypes we have made. In our prototypes we envisioned a scroll wheel, similar to Lone Wolf’s track ball. I think this type of grip is in a design category that will be one of our next 4 grips, which pushed it into our runner up entry. The presentation was clean and professional as well. A couple of the design features aren’t perhaps practical, such as the temperature changing module and the pain simulator, but they’re very cool nonetheless. Maybe we actually will find a way to implement those type of features as well. Overall, a strong design and along the lines of where we’re headed, so, well done.

Winner:
Entry from gkaee,
gkaee's entry was a sword handle grip for the Falcon. There were a number of reasons we felt it was the winner of the contest, just edging out the runner up and honorable mentions. First, it is a design that we felt captures a critical direction for Novint. One of the key things we would like to do as a company is give people a sense of immersion across a wide variety of genres. A sword handle represents a class of grip that we feel is important to several game genres, and is therefore is practical and high value in our eyes. It would be a reasonably inexpensive grip to design, which is important. A ball joint attachment was described, which is representative of an aspect of future grips that we envision. This was the only entry with an animated cad model, which was a nice touch in the presentation. We would have liked to have seen more design features in the grip’s industrial and aesthetic design. Also, the bow and arrow enhancement to the grip, although a very cool idea, wasn’t our favorite as the Falcon itself, through its motors, can accurately simulate a bow and arrow in a more realistic way. However, those slight changes didn’t take away from the overall design and presentation, and given it was a design in a different category of gaming grip, it stood out from the rest to become our winner. Congratulations gkaee on winning the contest, and welcome to the Falcon family!!! Let us know what you think, when your Falcon arrives.

You can see images at
http://novintblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/hey-everyone-following-is-listing-of.html

Again, we very much appreciate the interest and participation in the contest. There were many quality entries. Some other entries that didn’t make it into the honorable mentions were great ideas, but didn’t have quite as much polish as other entries. There were also a few funny entries that were appreciated. We’ll be posting images of the entries described here on the Novint blog.

We originally intended to only give out 1 Falcon to the winner (congratulations gkaee!!!), but given how much effort was actually put into these we didn’t feel right not presenting others with something. We decided to give out certificates to the others as follows. There’s no obligation to use the certificates, but for any of those who would like to, we think they’re nice prizes.

Winner: Free Novint Falcon!
Runner Up: $150 certificate towards the purchase of the $199 Falcon bundle.
Honorable Mentions: $125 certificate towards the purchase of the $199 Falcon bundle.
Other entrants: $100 certificate towards the purchase of the $199 Falcon bundle.

Thanks everyone for a great contest, and thanks again to halflife2.net. It was fun to judge
The Novint Team