Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display peripheral interface input device
Reexamination Certificate
2000-05-09
2004-03-23
Hjerpe, Richard (Department: 2674)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display peripheral interface input device
C345S215000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06710764
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to interface devices between human users and computers, and more particularly to methods and systems that provide force feedback effects to the user.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Computer systems are used extensively in different industries to implement application programs including sophisticated computer controlled simulations, office-work tasks and interactive games. These interactive games have soared in popularity in the mass market of home consumers who use personal computers. A computer system running an application program or an interactive game typically displays a visual environment to a user on a monitor or other visual display device. The user interacts with this computer-generated environment to play a game, experience a simulation, or other virtual reality environment, by using various typical input devices, such as a keyboard, a stylus and tablet, a trackball, a mouse, a joystick, a gamepad, a steering wheel, foot or hand pedals, or the like, that is connected to the computer system providing the displayed environment. The host computer updates the application program in response to the user's manipulation of an input device, and provides a corresponding feedback to the user via the display device. This virtual reality environment has also been extended to include audio speakers to provide the user with sound as well as visual displays to further enrich the user's interactive experience.
Another extension of the virtual reality environment has been directed towards providing tactile feedback to the user, more generally known as force feedback. The inclusion of force feedback in input devices has transformed these devices from input devices to interface or physical interaction devices, because besides providing input to the host computer, they also provide physical sensations to the user. These physical sensations are generated in the physical interaction device in response to it receiving force feedback effect commands from the host computer executing a force feedback-enabled application program. Typically motors or other physical actuation devices are coupled to the interface object which is connected to the host computer to generate these physical sensations. Such physical sensations include the rumbling of the device when the user crashes her car in a virtual environment; mechanical jolts when the user drives over a speed bump; drag forces simulating aerodynamic drag on flying surfaces and “kick back” of the joystick to simulate the firing of a gun and the like.
The initial introduction of force feedback-enabled devices had focused on providing high fidelity effects in rather expensive and high-end products. The more current trend has been to expand the use of force-feedback-enabled devices into the higher volume consumer market. Typical prior art force feedback-enabled device manufacturer's have focused their efforts on moving the control aspects of the force feedback effects to the device itself, by providing the devices with rather sophisticated local microprocessors and ample memory to allow the devices to store, manage, and compute all possible force effects locally. One reason for the large on-device memories has been the requirement of enabling the devices to be capable of playing back all the possible effect types that an application program has. This way, upon device initialization, an application program would download all its possible effect types to the device for on-device storage. A reason for including sophisticated on-device microcontrollers has been to avoid latency effects introduced by the time loop from the device to the host and back. Such time delays, although small, manifest themselves in the devices feeling choppy and rather delayed when playing back force feedback effects. Therefore these prior art approaches, upon the initialization of a device, download all the possible force feedback effect types to the device and store them in its memory for subsequent playback. Such prior art approaches are exemplified by devices manufactured based on technology from Immersion Corporation of San Jose, Calif. and described in various patents assigned to it as typified by U.S. Pat. No. 6,028,593, and devices manufactured based on technology from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. and described in various patents assigned to it as typified by U.S. Pat. No. 6,036,495. The assignee herein, itself offers force feedback enabled devices based on the Immersion approach, such as the WingMan® Force joystick device. The limitations of these prior art approaches will be discussed below.
The DirectInput application program interface (“API”) in Direct X, from Microsoft Corporation has become a de facto standard API used to control these devices on the Windows-based platforms, which is by far the most popular operating system for home computers and which represents the largest potential mass market for such devices. DirectX is targeted towards game developers to allow them to directly and with least overhead possible, talk to the existing hardware, without having to explicitly consider hardware-specific parameters. It can be viewed as a minimal abstraction of hardware. Between the game (application program) and the hardware there are device drivers, which realize the abstraction for their specific hardware. DirectInput presents all connected gaming devices in a uniform matter to the game; the game can query the device through DirectInput for data, its capabilities and adjust its controls accordingly.
A hardware device vendor has to provide the following components to get their device running and accepted as a standard DirectX compliant force-feedback device:
a “driver”, which is a piece of software that plugs into DirectInput, acts on requests from games to play/stop/change a force, and translates those requests into something the device understands under the best possible conservation of the fidelity;
a list of forces, registered in a system-wide database called “registry”, describing what effects are possible, and what the effect's limitations are in terms of timing resolution, additional complexity, advanced capabilities;
a force-feedback capable device which performs the commands sent to it by the driver
DirectInput's role in this architecture is shown in FIG.
1
. DirectInput's role is simply to mediate and connect between the driver
114
and the device
116
and the application
110
. The game's requests pass through to the driver
114
, after the initial setup, almost unmodified. The driver's role in this architecture is merely a repackaging operation to strip down the application program's request(s) down to what the device has. For example, gaming effects written with their time parameter in psec. may need to be converted to msec. DirectInput
112
does a minimal amount of error checking and parameter normalization and the game's commands
110
end up at the driver
114
after a very thin layer of processing, which makes this approach very desirable in terms of performance, because by having only a small amount of processing, the application's commands reach the device with the least possible amount of latency, and leave more processing time for other tasks on the host.
DirectInput's force-feedback architecture was modeled after what is possible in devices, and devices were made with the DirectInput model in mind. Most devices have a more or less 1-to-1 correspondence in their internal workings to what DirectInput presents to a game. Most devices support a set of effects and a set of parameters for each effect.
FIG. 2
shows this rather 1-to-1 correspondence between the game effects (those effects generated by the host application program) and the device effects (those effects downloaded to the device). The prior art devices provide sufficient local memory to allow it to download all possible game effects using their entire description to the device for storage and subsequent processing and play
Bosa Roland
Burgel Thomas
Hjerpe Richard
Laneau Ronald
Logitech Europe S.A.
Townsend and Townsend / and Crew LLP
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