We got a chance to go hands-on (chest-on?) with OWO’s haptic vest in partnership with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and it was a slimy, bizarre experience]. It was an early Friday morning at Gamescom and the booth wasn’t open to the public yet, so I was able to get plenty of time being stabbed/punched/shot in a variety of places on my chest in th🍌e name of immersion. Before I could put the vest on, I had to sign a waiver, which made me feel a bit nervous about how close the vest could come to making me feel like I’d been ganked with a hidden blade.
They ran me through a test with a range of different sensations to gauge how much I could handle. For the record, I set the sensations to level 15, out of a possible 80. At 15, my muscles were already tensing when the mild electric shocks were delivered through the strange gooey pads now attached to my bare skin, underneath a skin-tight vest. I felt a little bit like a slug inside. The guy hosting me said that at a push he 💧had managed an intensity setting of 25.
To say that being stabbed in the stomach with the haptic vest on hurt is not exactly correct - it’s not pain, but it’s definitely a weird sensation. When you are “stabbed”, you feel the knife enter, then exit, and then the gush of blood around the wound. It’s a totally bizarre experience. I was taken through a bunch of different sensations, from a soft wind across my body to being shot in the shoulder. A few times when I was hit in the upper arms, I felt my bicep muscles contract and spasm slightly🔴 - it wasn’t all together pleasant, but then this vest isn’t necessarily designed for someone who’s looking for a good time. I have no idea what an intensity rating of 80 would feel like
The vest is marketed as a tool for those players who want to really feel the game. If that means experiencing mild pain, then you do you. I can definitely see the power of this tool used properly in conjunction wit🧸h a game like Assassin’s Creed, where the hits actually hit you, and what sort of impact this would have on how you play the game. If it hurts to get stabbed in the shoulder, you b♕et I’m going to try my hardest not to get stabbed in the shoulder. The potential for this kind of technology (the kind that connects the player more and more deeply to the gameplay) is massive, but we’re not quite there yet.
I didn’t actu🅘ally get to test the vest with Assassin’s Creed, and instead had this wave-based shooter where you are attacked by multiple drones. It was a classic VR experience and not particu⭕larly showy, and I had a shield in my left hand to prevent me from getting a full-body shocking experience as I was pelted with projectiles. That being said, when I did get hit by a stray bullet, it was actually pretty incredible to see the velocity of the bullet then feel the sensation of where it hit me. It felt relatively in tune, if still a bit rudimentary. It didn’t feel like the best platform to experience what the vest has to offer, but I can understand that the technology is still in its infancy.
In terms of where I se🌊e this sort of tech in the future, the world of VR has been sort of trundling along in the background for a few years now. Until the tech is more affordable and easier to set up and use at home, we won’t see any real explosive popularity. Niche tools like the haptic vest are fantastic and show innovation in an area which can only grow over time, but for now, it seems like something only a handful of die-hard tech enthusiasts and players will care about. But if this technology ends up being widely adopted, maybe we’ll all be dying hard.