Feeling the VR action

It’s not just what you watch. You’ve got to feel what you see.

The Teslasuit

It’s not just what you watch. You’ve got to feel what you see. That’s the philosophy behind Teslasuit, a full-body haptic feedback suit that takes the immersive nature of virtual reality vision to a deeper level.

When you put on a VR headset, you can experience being somewhere else. You could be on a virtual rollercoaster ride, virtually learning to surf on a board in your living room or helping as an emergency responder to a fire. You could be virtually sprinting in a 100m dash or undergoing rehabilitation.

VR headsets are impressive but you don’t feel you are investing your entire body in the virtual environment. The haptic feedback from the body suit adds another dimension to VR by artificially producing the body sensations associated with the virtual activity.

The suit is not just about applying pressure to create a touch sensation. It’s about stimulating your nerves and muscles so you believe the sensations are real. The suit achieves this using electrical muscle stimulation and transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation.

The suit also has climate control so you could wear it to simulate running the 100m in a hot, humid climate. You could simulate some of the heat of being at a fire scene but you don’t get burned. Training firefighters is one application envisaged by Teslasuit — which has no connection with Elon Musk’s Tesla.

The company says the suit can simulate the feeling of wind and rain. The Teslasuit also has a body movement capture mode. You can replay the movements you previously made when you were, say, sprinting and refine your gait to be more efficient. The Teslasuit could be useful in
post-neural surgery rehabilitation or other recovery situations that require similar stimulus.

Taking a Teslasuit home for therapy could make an inpatient into an outpatient, so people don’t have to stay at hospital. The Teslasuitwill be on display and available for demonstration at the SingularityU Australia Summit 2019, to be held in Sydney on Tuesday and Wednesday. We’re told the price of the suit will depend on the application being built around it.

Teslasuit. RRP from $2200