I don’t know how many of these things I’ve seen advertised.  Basically, it’s like a rumble pack or vibrating controller for a video game system, but large enough to wear on yourself.  I’ve got one that supposedly works with my Super Nintendo (that should tell you how old it is) to allow me to feel all the action of my video games.  It doesn’t looks as discreet as this haptics jacket, but it does the same basic thing.

Here’s a quote from the IEEE Spectrum article:

“We want people to feel Bruce Lee’s anxiety about whether he will get out alive,” says the Philips researcher. The jacket, responding to signals encoded in the DVD or to a program designed to control the jacket on the fly, can do a host of things, such as “causing a shiver to go up the viewer’s spine and creating the feeling of tension in the limbs.”

I have to wonder if any jacket, regardless of how jiggly it might make your jello, can replicate the sense of anxiety in a movie.  Certainly William Castle famously tried the use of vibrating seats in his cult horror classic The Tingler, and those virtual reality simulator modules where you sit in a seat that moves, shifts, and rumbles with the action on a giant video screen were incredibly popular in the 90′s.  I can only wonder why Philips got Keith Morris to model the jacket.

Would you take your home theater experience one step beyond and strap yourself into a motorized windbreaker, or is that just a little too extreme?