Get Ready Player One! Tactsuit Turns In-Game Sounds Into Touch

It’s one thing to create peripherals for VR gaming; gloves, headsets and occasionally, vests, have hit the market for a couple of years now. What we hadn’t seen was a versatile suit that could be used for VR games, PC games and music alike.  Until BHaptics Tactsuit.

If you’re into Ready Player One experiences and VR gaming in general, then Bhaptics might not be strangers for you. In fact, Bhaptics have been perfecting their haptic peripherals for a while now, although mainly for VR arenas offering their products as enterprise solutions.

This January, the main component of the suit, the vest, hit Amazon (get it here). That’s a major step forward for VR gaming at home signaling Bhaptics’ intention to bring their hardware to mass-market. Now, you can take VR experience to a new level with the vest.

It wasn’t just Bhaptics’ choice to make the product more consumer-friendly that earned them a TTL award. The company also announced a brand new, innovative feature called “audio-to-haptic” for 7.1 sound channel. This means the company’s software can convert, in real time, sound output into haptic feedback from 7.1 channel and stereo sound system.

If you’re wearing the vest, then you’ll feel the direction of the sound in 40 haptic points located around your torso. This feature uses BLE, with a latency of 1/20ms ~= 50Hz or less (battery life 10hours+). It doesn’t get more real than that!

What we loved about Tactsuit is the versatility of it. It doesn’t just give a new meaning to the word “immersive” in virtual applications but in PC games, as well. And, as you’ll see in the video above, Yue also tried it during a music session. According to her, such a peripheral helps tune all your senses to one (sound) source. You don’t just hear the music, you feel it – literally.

We also appreciated that Bhaptics didn’t just limit itself at creating one piece of suit – the vest. No, they understood that receiving haptic feedback in more than one part of your body helps recreate the real-life experience we are all searching for.

So, on their website, you can find haptic face cushions that support Oculus, HTC Vive as well as Pimax. Your arms, feet and hands can also benefit from the technology with Tactosy accessories. They’re not available yet on Amazon, but they’ll probably come in the next months if the vest does as well as expected.

Suddenly, it’s not so hard to relate to Wade Watts’ character, huh?

This is one of several products that have won a TechTheLead Award, after being carefully selected by our editorial staff from all registered entries. Special Awards have been given to products and companies that the editorial staff hand-picked for their outstanding features. The TechTheLead Awards go to products/companies that embody at least one of the following criteria: most innovative features, most compelling use cases, best price versus quality ratio, best user experience, most positive impact for user and society.