I am interested in integrating the Novint Falcon haptic controller into a Unity3D application (It hasn't been built yet -- still in the evaluation phase).
I read questions/answers that seemed to indicate that:
there is no native haptic device support.
the engine does, however, allow for general dll communication.
I believe I also saw that it was possible to treat a device like a joystick, but I don't believe that will be sufficient to generate the types of effects desired.
Is it possible to develop a dll that talks directly to Unity via USB? Any other info that will help is appreciated.
Yes. It's definitely doable. There are plenty of USB libraries you can use. Just remember that if the library you use is in unmanaged code, it will only work in a standalone player, not a web build. And you need to have Unity Pro to use plugins.
If you somehow manage to find a way to communicate with the Falcon using the .net framework or some other pure .net external library - you can even use it in a web build, and develop using the free version of Unity :)
Hi, if you check up the Open Source API H3DAPI provided by SenseGraphics available under GNU/GPL license at www.H3DAPI.org the HAPI package might be something for you!?
Using the component HAPI, which concerns the haptics only, you can get haptics functionality with your application AND hardware independeny as well supporting more haptics hardware including the SensAble, ForceDimension, Moog and Novint of course.
The H3DAPI forum is very active so you will have more infroamtion on your requests there if you like.