Super Angry Birds is a force feedback USB controller for Angry Birds that simulates the feeling of a slingshot. All the controls found in the game are available in this device. You can control the pull, the angle, and of course trigger the special power of the bird.

We hacked a motorized fader found in audio mixing consoles to create the force feedback. If you are interested, you can read the paper. Basically, the way we achieved this is by drawing a force curve and storing the values in a table, then we send the current position of the slider through the table and extract the value to send to the motor that applies an opposing force. You can check this in action in the “How it Works” part of the video.

We programmed in Max/MSP and Arduino. For controlling the hardware, we used an Arduino-based microcontroller called Music & Motors (check the photo below on the right) developed by CIID.

This project was made by Hideaki Matsui and I (Andrew Spitz) in a class on Haptics at CIID run by Bill Verplank and David Gauthier.