bHaptics review: feel your body in VR with this haptic suit!

Two years ago, when I went to the Gamescom with Max, I had the possibility of trying a haptic suit by Korean company bHaptics and I appreciated the more realism it could give to VR games. These days, the Korean company has been so kind as to send me a devkit for a review, so here you are the typical detailed review in Skarredghost-style on the bHaptics haptic system!

bHaptics video review

If you like videos, here you are my visual review on the bHaptics system, where I evaluate its features, highlighting pros and cons, and I also test the suit with Half-Life: Alyx and our game HitMotion: Reloaded!

The usual detailed written review follows below here 😉

What is bHaptics?

bHaptics is a Korean company producing haptic systems for virtual reality. What the company is trying to offer is the sensation of touch on various parts of your body thanks to the use of little motors that vibrate.

The full suite consists of a suit for the torso, plus wearable elements for: arms, hands, feet, and even the face. All these clothes contain many tiny motors that can vibrate with different intensities to emulate different touch sensations (e.g. being touched vs receiving a punch). Since every element contains many motors, it is also possible to produce complex haptic patterns with these motors: e.g. you can feel to be shot on an exact point on your back by making only one tiny motor to vibrate, or you can simulate energy flowing up from your body by making the vibrations start from the lowest motors, then go to the upper ones, until you arrive at the ones of the head.

What is cool is that the system is completely modular, so you can buy the various parts separately and every one of them doesn’t need the others. And they don’t even need VR, the whole system can work attached to whatever Bluetooth-enabled device.

What is NOT bHaptics is a system for tracking, which should be provided by the application, or a force-feedback system either: it just gives you the sensations of touch.

Unboxing

bHaptics gadgets are packaged quite well: the boxes are very elegant, and inside the elements are put in a well-ordered way. Every package contains all the accessories needed to run it independently, so a Bluetooth dongle for your PC, a USB-C cable to charge the device, etc… This gives you some redundant elements if you buy more gadgets (I am full of Bluetooth dongles now), but makes sure that you can buy only one device and make it to work without owning the others. I think the company has done a great job with it.

A very curious detail is that while all the gadgets smelled like Chinese plastic when I opened them, the suit for the torso had a pleasant smell of green tea… don’t ask me why… maybe is the bHaptics rep packaging it for me a tea-addicted? I hope someone will solve the mystery.

Design

bHaptics devices are all black, very elegant, and also very cool to be worn. I especially love the style of the haptic suit, that seems like the bulletproof vest of some military mercenary troops. Wearing it, you immediately feel cool and ready for the battle. I make my sincere compliments to bHaptics for the choice of the design! It puts you immediately in the part inside shooter games, and I think that mixed reality videos of FPS games in VR come out great with it.

In my tests, I had the pleasure of playing with the TACTOT torso suit, that looks like a cool armor, the TACTOSY arm bracelets, that look like big bracelets and the TACTAL facial interface, that just substitutes the facemask of your VR headset.

Every device has a similar design made by elements in fabric that you can wear, plus a little plastic box containing the battery, the circuitry and the Bluetooth Antenna. On the box, there is also the button to turn it on, with a colored led having a different color depending on the type of device (e.g. the suit was yellow to me, while one of the bracelets was red and the other one blue).

Comfort

While I like the design of bHaptics products a lot, I’m not a big fan of their comfort. I mean, it is not bad, but it is just ok-ish.

Both the arm interfaces and the suit suffer from the problem of how much tight do you want them to be. Let’s take one TACTOSY arm bracelet, for instance. It can be closed around your arm thanks to velcro that is present on it: you pull the fabric until the bracelet is tight on your arm, then you close it, and then you are ready to play. If you keep it very tight, it squeezes your arm, and so it feels uncomfortable. If it is too loose, on the other side, you feel less the haptics sensations and the device could also move along your arm, becoming a true nuisance. And if the fit is already complicated on the arm, it is even more on the chest, that inflates and deflates following your respiration, and should always adhere to the suit that is pretty rigid. Finding a compromise is the key, but it is exactly like when you want to have a shower and try to have warm water… usually, you just obtain it too cold or too hot, and almost never how you want it to be.

The facial interface TACTAL made my HTC Vive more heavy on the front, and being quite thick and rigid, also made the headset slightly more uncomfortable and reduced my field of view. Not to mention the fact that if it is not fit properly, its endpoints finish to close your nose in a way that you can’t breath while you are in VR. Been there, done that and it is not pleasant at all. Luckily, if you find the right fit this doesn’t happen.

A final mention goes to the fact that now it is summer and here in Italy it is quite hot. Wearing the armor (that is not lightweight at all) on my torso, the bracelets on my arms, and the headset on my head while playing in VR made me sweat really a lot and I had to take frequent breaks in which I completely removed all these devices. Keep the air conditioning on if you want to wear this suit.

Setup

Setting up a bHaptics system is very simple. For every gadget, what you have to do is:

• Unbox it;
• Use the USB cable to charge it for various hours. For the suit, that has the biggest battery, at least 4 hours are required for the first charge;
• Wear it, usually by using some velcro to tighten it around your body. It is very intuitive to understand how to wear every device on your body, and you don’t need particular instructions. The only thing that may seem a bit more complicated is the TACTAL facemask, but in the end, it is just a matter of removing the facemask of your HMD and attaching the new one using some velcro;
• Attach a Bluetooth dongle to your PC (it is already provided in every box);
• Turn the device on;
• Use the bHaptics Player to pair it to your PC;
• Done, you can play your games!

I was pretty scared by having to install so many devices, while in the end I have to admit it was incredibly fast and simple. bHaptics offers a user experience with its runtime, called bHaptics Player, that is really great. It lets you manage the devices one by one, by pairing them, testing them to see if they work (you can make them vibrate, and with the TACTOT suit, you can even draw different patterns to make its single motors to vibrate), solving little problems (e.g. you can easily swap the left and right bracelet), verify the status (e.g. the current battery charge), and so on. I hardly found from a startup a runtime that is so great to manage a product, so big kudos to bHaptics!

If you are curious about the full setup procedure for the bHaptics suit, I got you covered with this new video:

Supported headsets

As I told you before, bHaptics suit and accessories, even if they actually shine in VR, are not VR-specific hardware. This means that they can work with just a PC, and this implies that they can be used with whatever headset connected to that PC.

The real question is: what about headsets that don’t rely on PC like the Oculus Quest or the Vive Focus Plus? Surprisingly, bHaptics found a way to make its devices with them as well. The procedure to activate it is a bit different, though: since you can’t have a runtime controlling the pairing and all the rest on a standalone headset (I mean, it would be not that useful), the pairing of the hardware must be directly embedded into the application that provides the haptics sensations. bHaptics made it very easy for the developers to implement it thanks to a Unity prefab that must just be dragged into your project. I tried one game implementing bHaptics on Quest, and everything worked very well.

Supported games

After having read this article until this chapter, you are probably intrigued by the bHaptics suit. But you may be asking yourself: with what games/applications is it compatible?

You can find the full list of compatible experiences at this link. If you’re lazy to click the link, I’ll tell you that at the time of writing, 22 VR experiences are somewhat compatible on PC, and 6 are compatible on Quest. The compatibility is guaranteed either by the developer implementing the bHaptics SDK into his application or by a custom mod that added the support.

If you are thinking like me that the number of compatible experiences is a bit disappointing, well, I agree with you. 22 experiences is not a good number, especially if we consider that some of them require a custom mod that must be installed and in some cases (VRChat) even paid. Content is the king, and the available bHaptics-compatible content is still little.

On the other side, I have to say that bHaptics has on its side some very cool games like Half-Life: Alyx, Skyrim, Sairento VR, and the most popular social VR experience VRChat. On Quest, the best boxing game The Thrill Of The Fight is also compatible with bHaptics. So, if you buy a suit, for sure you can play some great games with it.

What about not supported games? Well, bHaptics has ideated a way to somewhat simulate the support, that is give you haptic sensations on your torso based on the audio that the game is playing. This feature, called “Audio-to-Haptic”, can be activated by pressing a button on the bHaptics Player control window and of course can’t give you the realistic haptic sensations the game should provide, but at least gives you some haptic in all games that you play. And in some cases, like for Beat Saber and The Walking Dead: Saint and Sinners, the Korean company has also tuned the feature so that the suit can also react to specific in-event games like shooting with a gun (probably recognizing the sound coming out from your speakers) to provide you more realistic vibrations. I think that it is a nice idea to expand the compatibility of the suit to all VR games on the market.

Test on applications

I’ve tested some applications with the bHaptics suit. Here below, I’ll tell you something about these experiments, that happened both on my PC (+ HTC Vive) and my Oculus Quest. Before starting talking about my experience, let me highlight one cool thing that I’ve noticed with any device: the battery of bHaptics gadgets lasts for very long, and after the first charge I had never to charge it again for all the tests that I have performed for this review.

PC (HTC Vive)

The first test I did with my PC has been with Beat Saber and the “Audio-To-Haptic” feature. I have to say that it was pretty cool feeling my body vibrating following the rhythm of the music: it was a synesthetic experience, where I could not just hear, but also feel the music. But after like 2 minutes, I got pretty tired of it. Beat Saber is a game about music, so it continuously plays audio, that gets translated to haptic feedback. So you have a suit that vibrates continuously for minutes, and while in the beginning, this is nice, after a while, it starts becoming a bit too much, and your body needs a break. When the song finished, I could still feel some ghost sensations of vibrations. I personally haven’t liked much this experience, if not at the beginning.

Talking about the supported experience, I have tried at first Tsun-Tsun VR, an experience about anime girls touching your body. Yes, it sounds like soft porn… and that’s why I wanted to try it. The experience was so-and-so: when the position of the hand of the girl matched the real point of vibration of the suit, it was cool, otherwise, it was disappointing. And honestly speaking, it was not as soft porn as I hoped :D.

I then tried Hell Breakers, a free game specially made to make you try your bHaptics suit: it is a spell casting game, where hordes of monsters goes towards you and you have to shoot them with spells. Here I started getting some real good sensations about the suit: when someone shot me in the back, I could feel that it had happened, and so I could understand immediately that I had to counterattack something behind me without the need for any visual cue. The shots on the body were a pleasant addon to the game, that made it more immersive. The only problem was when too many enemies started shooting me, I had all the suit vibrating and it was quite confusing, and also a bit annoying (it was like the Beat Saber experience described above). Having the arms vibrating when casting the spells was also quite cool.

Half-Life: Alyx is playable with bHaptics through a mod that you find at this link. You have to install the mod by copying some files in the game directory and by launching a dedicated patch, then you can start Alyx. Haptic feedback in Alyx gives more immersion: I think that shooting games and fighting games are the ones that benefit the most by bHaptics. While the recoil sensations of the guns on my hands implemented through vibrations were a bit weird (force feedback would be much more suited for this task), other things were incredibly cool. When I launched a grenade too close to me and it exploded, I felt my chest vibrating, and that was very immersive. The same happened every time I triggered the Grabbity Gloves (the Russel’s) to attract some object: the vibrations were perfect to give feedback for this operation. Using the medipack created a flow of energy through my body, but maybe the best sensation was when I put some ammo in my back inventory. As soon as I released the magazine, I could feel the haptic sensation of something falling down through my back, as something really slipped into a bag there. I loved that sensation, it was so cool.

https://gfycat.com/angrysphericalcuttlefish

As I’ll describe in the SDK section, I’ve also implemented bHaptics in a VR-tech-demo-version of our mixed reality boxing game HitMotion: Reloaded, so that for every punch to the enemies, you can feel a vibration on your arm. I tested it myself and I also made my friends try it and we all agree that the game is more immersive this way. It gives more the sensation that you have impacted with something.

https://gfycat.com/anothersarcasticcaimanlizard

The is also a mod for VRChat, but getting it requires some extra step I’m too lazy doing (it forces you to make a monthly donation to the creator on a website I’ve never registered to), but from the videos it seems very cool: people all around the world can touch your body in VR and you could feel that in real life!

I also made some tests with some toy programs, and I have to say that it is amazing also when you get a headshot and your facial interface vibrates. It is something unexpected yet incredibly cool.

The final opinion is that when the vibration sensation is coherent with what you can experience in real life (like an object falling down on your backpack), bHaptics increases a lot the realism of your VR experiences. In other cases, its vibrations may feel a bit random and not that immersive. All of this considered, usually is more cool having the suit than not having it.

Oculus Quest

I made a quick test with the free game MissionX: Lite on SideQuest, and I verified that actually the suit can pair with your Quest and give you haptic feedback when you play your games. And all of this without cables, it is amazing! All the considerations about haptics that I’ve written in the above paragraph about PC holds on Quest as well.

SDK

Being a developer, of course one of the first things that I did was digging into the bHaptics SDK, that you can find on the Unity asset store or on Unreal Engine Marketplace. And I was pleasantly surprised by it.

The SDK contains everything you need as a developer:

• An ordered Unity package, with all the various elements divided into directories;
• Some sample scenes to analyze;
• A quick start guide.

Playing a haptic feedback is very similar to playing an audio file (in the end, both of them are a matter of vibrations), so bHaptics has very smartly divided the haptics development task in two stages, exactly as it happens with audio, when creation of the content and playback are separated:

• Creation of the haptic pattern, that is the vibrational pattern that has to happen on all the various motors of a single device (e.g. one of the pattern can make all the suit vibrate strongly to emulate an explosion, or can make you feel a vibration that goes towards up and down to simulate some energy flowing in your body). These patterns can be easily designed with a visual web-based tool called bHaptics Designer and exported in .asset files ready to be imported into Unity.
• Once you are inside Unity, you can import these patterns and play them to play the haptics effect. You can hardcode the haptic effect to play, or you can use some scripts (Haptic Source / Haptic Receiver) to define the different patterns to play depending on the part of the body that has to be affected. E.g. you can make a bullet with associated the haptics effect that it has to play depending on if it hurts the head or the vest.

I can tell you that using the SDK is very easy and I have implemented some haptic feedback inside our game HitMotion: Reloaded in really less than 5 minutes! And it was so cool punching the drones and feeling the haptic vibrations on the hitting hand, it really enhanced the gaming experience.

Price and availability

bHaptics devices are already available through bHaptics website or through official resellers like Amazon. The prices are:

• TACTOT haptic suit: $499
• TACTOSY for arms: $249 (for a pair)
• TACTOSY for hands: $249 (for a pair)
• TACTOSY for feet: $249 (for a pair)
• TACTAL facial interface: $149

As you can see the prices are quite affordable for an experimental device of this kind.

Final impressions

My final opinion on bHaptics is for sure very positive: the suit has a price that is not cheap, but it is anyway affordable, it is easy to set up, it has a great design, it features a great runtime, it is compatible with almost all platforms, it has a very valid SDK and it can increase the realism of VR games. I loved it when the vibrations of the suit clicked perfectly with what was happening in the virtual world. In those cases, bHaptics can make you feel more deeply inside your virtual adventure.

But it is not always the case, and sometimes the vibrations feel a bit gimmicky, especially because they are not paired with any kind of force feedback. The suit also feels a bit uncomfortable to wear especially in summer, and the users must take breaks from having it all the time. But I think that its real problem is compatibility: being compatible with only a few games, make me think that this device is more suited for LBVR venues that want to give a better experience to their customers, or to prosumers for enterprise/military training experiences (that could benefit a lot for it), than to general consumers that want to play in VR with it every day.

In the end I enjoyed my time with bHaptics and I’m very glad to have had the opportunity of experimenting with it: it is a product crafted really well, both from a hardware and software standpoint, and I think that if you need haptics for your XR experience, you should really consider buying it.