A low-cost force feedback joystick and its use in PC video games

The authors have developed a low-cost and compact force feedback joystick as a new user interface to communicate with a computer. They adopted a DC-motor powered joystick to create the illusion of force to a human hand. As applications in entertainment, without modifying the source code of the PC video games, they intercept the interrupts reserved for mouse, colormap and keyboard input and replace them with a new interrupt service routine in which force effects are added for the new PC video games. Effects such as hitting a wall, pushing a spring, reaction force of firing a hand gun, and crash of a vehicle can be easily simulated, thus making haptic simulation readily available in virtual environments