A Company Just Invented A VR Suit That Electrocutes Your Whole Body
Well, sure, a suit that electrocutes me is what I've always wanted for Christmas.
What do you get the person who has everything and isn’t Thor, Storm of the X-Men, Raiden from Mortal Kombat, Black Lightning, Electro, Lightning from Big Trouble in Little China, that opera dude from The Running Man, that one guy in Misfits of Science, and more heroes and villains from pop culture than it probably makes sense for us to name? Well a new VR suit is on sale for the low, low price of around $20,000. And for that paltry sum, you get a wonderful new attire that electrocutes you.
As Futurism reports, the company Teslasuit has created a VR suit that “can literally electrocute you all over the body.” Now, to be clear, it doesn’t electrocute in a corporal punishment kind of way. Instead, it uses 90 electrodes built into the suit to simulate one of the five senses currently missing from the virtual reality experience — the sense of touch.
Futurism says that the VR Teslasuit’s electrodes can simulate the feeling of being pelted with rain drops, being struck by gunfire, and could even allow two different people using the suits to be able to feel as if they’re touching one another. The VR suit can reportedly even simulate the G Forces being felt by a driver in an F1 racecar. You can watch a video below that shows off the suit, though it mainly focuses on its motion capture rather than its sensory simulation.
Tech Radar‘s Hamish Hector got the chance to try out the Teslasuit and was impressed with its performance. Hector described the experience of wearing the suit and playing a driving simulator, writing, “Electrical pulses fired into my arms and core, making my muscles feel heavier and I believed my body was actually being thrown around by the acceleration and deceleration caused by a moving racecar.” Hector also tested out the VR suit with a virtual reality shooting range. Although he was initially concerned the experience might be more painful, he compared the sensation to “playing paintball in real life after the first hit.”
These suits won’t be readily available for just anyone to keep in their living room draped over their PlayStation. Hector said the VR suit he tried out was designed specifically either for “top-tier athlete training” or “patients going through medical rehab.” So for the rest of us who just want to punch our buddy in the stomach virtually or have a lightsaber battle and actually feel the strikes, we might have to wait a while.
The VR suits up for sale right now are, as previously mentioned, going for around $20,000 a suit and only 10 of them are available. But hey, if you’ve got the dough and want to know what it’s like to feel virtual rain drops, they’re up for auction on OpenSea.
In the meantime, some folks are hoping to go beyond the comparatively mild sensory simulation of these VR suits and inflict actual pain on their users. Futurism notes that developer Emi Tamaki is creating wearable devices to simulate pain “to turn the metaverse world into a real world.” Yeah, you know. Because why not bring the good and the bad into the metaverse. You know. For kids!
