Wearable technology is all the rage nowadays, scientists developing more and more advanced apparel to serve all sorts of people's needs. This week, researchers from Philips Electronics plan to describe a jacket they have lined with vibration motors to study the effects of touch on a movie viewer’s emotional response to what the characters are experiencing. Basically, you'll have to be careful what movies you are going to see if you wear this Emotion jacket.

“People don’t realize how sensitive we are to touch, although it is the first sense that fetuses develop in the womb,” said Paul Lemmens, a Philips senior scientist who would be presenting research done using the jacket at the IEEE-sponsored 2009 World Haptics Conference 2009 in Salt Lake City.

 

The jacket contains 64 independently controlled actuators distributed across the arms and torso. The actuators are arrayed in 16 groups of four and linked along a serial bus. Each group shares a microprocessor. The actuators draw so little current that the jacket could operate for an hour on its two AA batteries even if the system was continuously driving 20 of the motors simultaneously.

 

But don't go imagining now that the jacket can make you feel a blow in the ribs while watching a Bruce Lee movie. Although the garment can simulate outside forces, translating kicks and punches is not what the actuators are meant to do. The aim is investigating emotional immersion.

 

“We want people to feel Bruce Lee’s anxiety about whether he will get out alive,” revealed 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.”

 

Although the jacket has only eight actuators along the length of each sleeve (four in front and four in back) spaced about 15 centimeters apart, those actuators can create the sensation that the arm is being tapped in several spots between the motors (a phenomenon called the cutaneous rabbit illusion).

 

We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .