This Vest Lets You Feel Gunshots, Lasers, and Stab Wounds in VR

I stood in the middle of a crowded convention center gripping a beating human heart in my fist, while dozens of people passed by barely glancing in my direction. It felt steady and rhythmic against my palm and fingers, attempting to push blood that was there into a body that it wasn’t in. Soon it weakened before stopping entirely.

For a moment, it reminded me of my own mortality—and the way that, one day, my heart would slow to the same weakened pulse before stopping forever. Before an existential dread could overcome me entirely, though, a voice snapped me out of it saying, “So that was the heart demo. In the next one, you can see what a failing liver feels like.”

Instantly, I remembered that the heart I was holding wasn’t real but rather a virtual heart that only I could see thanks to a pair of augmented reality glasses I was wearing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The beating I felt was real—but it actually came from a glove I was wearing from Microtube Tech, a Singapore startup focused on creating haptic technologies—or tech that allows you to “feel” things in virtual reality.

“In the virtual world, you can only see digital objects. You may be able to hear the sounds but you can’t really touch and feel them,” Yeo Joo Chuan, the co-founder and CEO of Microtube, told The Daily Beast. “With our glove, you can now touch and differentiate whether an object is hard or soft. You can experience raindrops. You can even shoot digital objects out of your hands and feel that as well.”

Haptic tech represents the next level of virtual reality—allowing users to finally be able to feel the things they see represented on their VR/AR headsets. While companies like Meta have attempted to replicate these sensations through things like vibrations in their Quest controllers, it’s a far cry from the real deal.

That’s why researchers like Chuan are hard at work developing products like gloves in order to give users the ability to finally feel their virtual environments. Doing so not only offers obvious benefits to things like gaming, but also has potential in everything from search and rescue, deep-sea exploration, and even space missions.

For Microtube, Chuan said that he sees a lot of applications in clinical settings and training medical students—which is the reason behind the macabre demo I took part in. Using the company’s haptic glove, students are able to feel the difference between healthy human hearts with strong heartbeats and those weaker ones with heart failure.

“The technology behind it involves a microtube sensor and an actuator developed by us,” Chuan said. “The microtube sensor measures your finger movements, and the actuator provides the burst of air into your fingertips or into your palms so you have feeling when you touch digital objects.”

Real Life Ready Player One

Haptic technology was probably depicted the best in the 2018 movie Ready Player One when the main character, Wade Watts, gets his hands on a haptic outfit that allows him to feel every touch, gunshot, and punch he receives in the virtual OASIS metaverse world.

While the way the technology actually works isn’t completely explained in the movie and book, I’d imagine it’d be a lot like the TactSuit haptic vest I used from bHaptics. The South Korean company provides a line of haptic products including arm and leg sleeves, a head visor, gloves, and a vest for gaming.

“We have about 200 games that have native support for the suit,” a bHaptics spokesperson told The Daily Beast. “So you can feel gunshots at the exact location you get shot. There’s also a drinking and eating effect when you consume things in the games. Stuff like that.”

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To achieve the effect, the spokesperson explained that the products contain different “haptic points,” which are vibrating motors that trigger in response to different stimuli in the game. For example, if you’re shot with a gun, the haptic points will vibrate where you were shot to simulate a wound.

The bigger the area on your body, though, the more vibration it needs. The TactSuit, for example, requires 40 haptic points throughout the front and back. Meanwhile, the glove has just 12 haptic points.

As the spokesperson handed me an Oculus headset and tightened the vest and gloves on me for the demo, I didn’t have high hopes that it’d be able to effectively replicate eating or drinking, let alone such a violent and painful sensation as getting shot. I’ve played plenty of shooting games before on my VR headset at home. While they can be realistic, I can’t ever say I’ve ever felt like I was actually shooting or being shot at.

However, as soon as the game booted up, and I was thrust into a digital shooting range, I started to have second thoughts. “Just pick up any of the guns in front of you and start shooting the targets,” the spokesperson told me.

I scanned around my new virtual environment and saw a table with three guns in front of me: a pistol, an assault rifle, and a shotgun. I grabbed the rifle, sighted one of the target dummies in my crosshairs, and pulled the trigger. Instantly, I felt the recoil of the rifle against my shoulder as I riddled the dummy with bullets. Similarly, the shotgun and pistol also vibrated and recoiled in my hands and body. It was impressive—but still not the pain I was promised.

Then the next stage came: enemies in the form of flying robot drones appeared and began swirling around me. “They’re going to shoot you now,” the spokesperson said in my ear. “So get ready!”

Soon, the drones targeted their barrels at me and unleashed a volley of digital laser blasts. Instantly, my body was being peppered with vibrations, which—surprisingly—stung. The vibrations weren’t painful, per se, but the combination of the immersive virtual environment and the surprise attack did enough to convince me, however temporarily, that I was actually being shot with lasers from flying robot drones.

The feeling came again later in a demo where I needed to stab myself with a syringe—something a video game might want you to do in order to simulate giving yourself a health boost (or drug dose). As I pushed the needle into my arm, I could feel the pressure from the wrist sleeve on that exact point on my skin. It was similar enough to being stabbed that I had to stop because it “felt” like it hurt.

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This is known as “phantom sense,” a psychological phenomenon often reported in VR users where they “feel” things in their digital environments. While they’re not real, the level of immersion provided by VR is often enough to give people the sensation that they’re actually experiencing the things that they see and hear. Couple it with, say, a pair of haptic gloves and a vest, and all of a sudden these feelings are less virtual and more reality.

As I took off my TactSuit and returned my headset, though, I wondered what exactly that says about us humans that we want so badly to feel these horrible things. It’s not enough to be shot and stabbed in a video game. We need the thump of the bullet hitting our chest, the sting of the puncture wound, the beating pulse of the heart as its life ebbs away in our hands.

The technology isn’t perfect. You still need to strap on a bulky vest and cumbersome gloves in order to replicate a fraction of the effect you would get in real life. Perhaps that’s for the best, though. Whether it’s being shot, stabbed, or holding human hearts, some things are just best left to the imagination.