Haptic Suit for Physical Immersion in Media and Entertainment

The term "haptics" finds its roots in the Greek word 'haptikos,' which means 'able to touch' or 'pertaining to the sense of touch.' In essence, haptics is the study and application of tactile sensations to human-computer interaction. While visual technology (screens, AR/VR) and audio technology (spatial audio, surround speakers) have advanced dramatically, the sense of touch remains largely unexplored in our digital world.

I conceived the idea for a full body haptic suit to add a tactile dimension to media experiences. As a music lover, I was intrigued by the idea of full body surround musical experiences. Literally to "feel the music".

Pixelating The Human Body With Touch Points

I decided to create points of touch distributed throughout the torso to enable spatiotemporal movements across the body. This allows the torso to be used like a canvas upon which developers can "paint" their experiences by considering the torso to be a grid of x,y coordinates. Here's a render of this system:

Haptic Vest Prototype

112 eccentric rotating mass (ERM) actuators were soldered onto Neopixel LED strips to simplify individual addressability. Using an ESP8266 MCU enabled us to control the suit in real time from the laptop via websocket protocol over WiFi. A large central transducer was used for simulating large bass drums.

Surround Body Music Experience

An AI source separation model was used to separate out bass, drums, vocals and other (piano, guitar, synths, effects, etc) waveforms, performed feature extraction on each waveform and mapped them to different parts of the body to enable a full body musical experience.