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The Product
The iFeel Mouse is a rather interesting product. One of the first
thoughts I had, and you may be having, is whether or not this mouse
is similar to the force-feedback joysticks available. Let me answer
that right off, and let you know that this is not like force-feedback
joysticks. Force-feedback joysticks are designed for gaming; the iFeel
mouse is designed more for what Logitech states as "productivity
people." C'mon isn't gaming productive?
Another question that I had was how the heck does the mouse work.
After reading some information on the matter, I discovered that
the mouse itself has a mechanism in it known as a High-Fidelity
Harmonic Drive Engine. The engine is controlled by the use of the
Touchsense software and drivers.
Basically, all your actions on the computer are transferred to
an API, which sends it to the driver, which controls the feel of
the mouse. The actual movement felt in the mouse is generated by
frequencies and amplitudes sent to the engine which makes it vibrate.
Despite being geared towards "productive people," there
are a few patches and mods available for games to make them Touchsense-activated.
These include:
Heavy Gear II
Shogo
Gruntz
Half-Life
Unreal Tournament
MDK 2
Quake
Slave Zero
Soldier of Fortune
BattleZone II
Testing
Well, now that is out of the way, let's get down to testing the mouse.
Since the mouse was designed for productive people, I guessed I had
better test it by doing some productive things. Fortunately, Logitech
sees surfing the Internet as productive, so I went off to surf some
sites.
The mouse was very neat while surfing the net. Whenever I would
scroll over a link, the mouse would give off a light vibration to
let me know that I was on a click able item. Selecting menu items
within my browser resulted in a stronger vibration allowing me to
differentiate between the two. While just surfing basic pages was
interesting, I would say the most fun was had at Immersion Touchsense-activated
sites. These are sites, which are built specifically for use with
the Touchsense-activated mice. An example of this would be blab.com.
This site allows you to send Touchsense-activated greeting cards
to your friends; although if they don't have a Touchsense-activated
mouse, they won't be able to experience the card.
Next I tested out various applications I had such as Word, Excel,
etc. I found that a lot of the actions that I completed had a slightly
different feel to it such as scrolling would give me a constant
vibration of the mouse.
Last, but not least, I went and tested out the Touchsense game
mod for Half-Life. I must say after playing the game for about an
hour that the Touchsense did add a whole new dimension to the game.
Each weapon had its own feel to it as well as the movement of your
character. Whenever you jumped, the mouse would give off a feel
of impact when you landed.
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