The Phantom versus the Falcon: Force Feedback Magnitude Effects on user’s Performance during Target Acquisition

Abstract

Applying force feedback applications in a therapy environment allows the patient to practice in a more independent manner, with less intervention of the therapist. Currently however, high-end devices such as the Phantom or the HapticMaster are far too expensive to provide a device per patient. Recently Novint launched a low-cost haptic device for the gaming market: the Falcon. In this paper we report on an experiment that we conducted in order to compare the Falcon and the Phantom, based on a Fitts' law targeting task. We deduced physical parameters such as inertia and damping, which were found to be different for the devices. Although from a velocity analysis these differences can be clearly seen, it turns out that the influence of different forces does not show significant differences when taking completion time and error rate into account. From a subjective experiment, we can learn that users allow the Falcon to produce slightly higher forces than the Phantom before forces are judged as too strong.