On the last day at AWE, I had some cool demos on the show floor, but the one that I will never forget has been OWO, the haptic shirt that traumatized me.
OWO Vest
OWO is a Spanish startup that is proposing this haptic shirt able to provide you with touch sensations via electrical stimuli. The shirt must be in direct contact with the body so that it can stimulate directly the skin and the muscles with the electricity, so you can’t wear clothes below it. It is meant to simulate especially the sensations typical of the FPS game: being hit by a projectile, stabbed by a knife, being a victim of an explosion, and so on. The idea is to make action games in XR more realistic, giving a bit of pain every time you are injured in XR. This is of course also very useful for training in XR, where if you feel real pain every time you commit some errors with some hazardous machine in the simulation, the brain will remember better the lesson of what not to do, so that you can learn more effectively how to work safely.
OWO was one of the coolest XR gadgets at CES 2022, and I wanted to try it at AWE so bad. When I met Skeeva and Alex VR at the event venue and I asked them how the shirt was, they told me “it was quite an experience” with a funny shocked face, and this made me even more intrigued by it. After I have tried it myself yesterday afternoon, now I understand the reasons behind that face. Let me explain them to you!
Price and availability
OWO Vest can be preordered now on its website and should be released around October for around $450.
Hands-on OWO Vest
Fitting
Having to remove my clothes to wear the OWO Shirt on the show floor was a bit weird, to be honest. Luckily, I had not to do that in front of all the attendees of AWE (even if this strip-tease maybe would have got me some cash tips), but there was a fitting room. I was asked what was my shirt size because the shirt must adhere well to the skin, so one size can not fit all. When I wore the shirt, and close it with the zip, I noticed it was pretty tight. Internally to the shirt, which was in some synthetic elastic fabric, there were some inserts in some specific positions made in a material that looked like something like plastified rubber. Those were the electrodes that could convey the electrical stimuli to some selected parts of the body.
After I wore the OWO Shirt and came out of the fitting room, the OWO employee who was helping me had to fix how the shirt was on my arms, because the electrodes came out from the sleeve. This shows that the fitting system is still not completely user-friendly. Plus wearing it was a bit weird: apart from being very tight, I could feel the stickiness of the electrodes on my skin, and that was not a very pleasant sensation. Nothing that bad, but anyway noticeable enough that all people that tried it reported to me about this.
Electrical stimulation
As soon as I had the shirt on, the OWO employee started making me used to it without the headset on, by making me feel the sensations it can give. I guess this step had two different purposes: first of all, since the shirt can give some “shocking” sensations, this would make me used to them while I was more aware of my body and the surrounding environments (so not in VR), so that I could feel safer in those moments; and then, as a second reason, this step was great to calibrate what is the right amount of “pain” that I wanted to feel.
The OWO guy started using an app connected to the vest that made me feel all the possible sensations the shirt could make me feel on all parts of the body. He started saying “Now I’ll give you the sensation of being hit by a ball. Let’s start with the chest” and touched the screen of his smartphone. In the beginning, I could feel nothing, so I wondered what was the deal with the shirt, then I felt some tingling, and then some clear little electrical shock on my chest. He asked if it was ok, or if it should be more or less strong, and I said it was a bit too strong, so he lowered it until I was comfortable. He then went to the next part of the body, doing the same thing, and so on, until all the parts had been done and so he went to the next sensation: “Now you’ll feel stabbed”. And so on until I tried all the sensations for all the parts of the body and he calibrated what was my pain limit for each one of them.
This part of the demo was a bit creepy.The sensations on the list were terrible ones. He never said “Now you’ll feel a girl caressing your body” or “You’ll feel the rain”, but the sensations were always something like “Now you’ll be shot”, “Now you’ll feel a knife entering your body, and then being rotated inside it” (I’m not joking, this was part of the demo), or “Now you’ll feel insects all over you”. It was a torture machine. Every time the guy said something, there were some seconds of pause in which I knew I was going to feel pain, but I could not feel pain yet, and the anticipation of pain felt more painful than the pain itself. When the electrical shock arrived, I was then always puzzled if keeping it at a low level, so that I could bear it comfortably but it was useless as feedback, or making it stronger and more realistic, but at the price of feeling pain. In the end, I tried to make a compromise. The worst moment at all was when he said “Now you’ll feel stabbed in the low part of your body” and I was worried for a moment about what he meant by “low part”… but luckily, it was just the region below the belly, and I had not my willy electrocuted. Mom, I can still have kids.
I don’t know how to exactly describe the sensation given by OWO: if you have ever had some kind of small electrical shock in your life (e.g. during some medical examinations), you know how it is when the electricity goes through your body. You feel some kind of tingling or pain, but especially it makes your muscles contract. If you have not, imagine if you have something that gives you a tiny bit of pain and that forces your muscles to contract and relax, giving a sort of sensation of “vibration” happening inside your body. The sensation is different from the one of haptics suits like bHaptics, but in some way it is comparable… it is a bit like if the shirt instead of making the motors of the bHaptics suit vibrate on your skin so that you feel the rumble, it makes your muscles vibrate as if they were a haptic motor. YOU become the haptic suit. It’s a kind of weird sensation. So when I tried the sensation of being stabbed with the knife rotated, I could feel at first my muscles vibrating on my back, and then a weird strong vibration on my belly, which represented the knife rotating.
Exactly as it happens with the bHaptics suit, the sensations you feel are not realistic. I’ve never been shot or stabbed (luckily), but I don’t think that these actions make the muscles vibrate at all: you just have your flesh damaged. When he made “Insects walking on my body”, I could just feel tickling on my chest, but I couldn’t feel the small legs of tiny animals walking on me. The sensations were interesting, and for sure they could also be painful, but they were not very realistic. In this, OWO shares the issue with all the other rumbling haptics suits. I don’t blame the OWO team for this, though: I don’t even know if it is possible to make you feel the sensation of a blade entering your body without having a true blade entering your body (or having a brain plug like in the Matrix). For sure, anyway, the sensations were stronger and more painful than the ones provided by a standard haptic suit, because in this case, it was your body to be directly stimulated.
After this physical and psychological torture in which in 10 minutes I have been stabbed, shot, and eaten everywhere in my body, he made me wear a VR headset to play a game using the suit.
Playing a VR game
The game I had to play was a simple one: I was in the middle of a warehouse, unable to move, and waves of drones arrived from all directions and tried to shoot me with different kinds of bullets: balls, lasers, and even explosive kamikaze attacks. I had just a gun to shoot at them, and the game ended when my health bar reached zero. Of course, every time I got shot, I could feel the sensation with the OWO vest.
Playing the game was “quite an experience” indeed: since the drones arrived from everywhere (including behind me), there was no way to shoot them all down before they hit me, so I kept being hit and feeling the pain of the suit for all the duration of the game. Since being shot hurt, my brain quite soon started becoming scared of being shot, and I entered a kind of survival mode in which I turned my head around quite scary, and tried to shoot whatever moved to avoid feeling pain again. On the other side, my rational brain was like “No, you are here to review the shirt, you must be hit so that you can write a better review”… but the pain fear was stronger than my rational thoughts. Some sensations of being hit were acceptable, while others, like being hit by the lasers that caused a horizontal “cut” on my chest, were more traumatic. The discomfort of being hit depended also on the zone of the body: for instance, being hurt around the belly was quite bad, and my body reacted as if I received a punch there. Unluckily I have not a video of me playing, otherwise you would see me shooting around and sometimes contracting my body because of the shots on the stomach. It was a bit of torture… even if around the end I was so used to the pain that I almost started feeling some perverted pleasure with the sensation of being electrocuted. Maybe this shirt is just training for BDSM slaves.
The aftermath
After I finished with the demo, I decided to sit down, relax and eat something for 10 minutes because I had to recover physically and psychologically from this. I needed a break. Jokingly, I said to myself I had some kind of PTSD. But seriously speaking, the experience has been pretty intense, and I needed time to relax and reach again a healthy mental state. After that time, I was ok, and I went back to the expo floor to try new XR devices.
Final impressions
My opinion on the OWO Suit is very mixed. On one side, I find it very original and effective: using electrical power to stimulate your body can give you true strong sensations, much more than the usual haptic suits, and it can truly give you pain sensations. This can be incredibly useful to develop more effective training applications or realistic VR action games. It is pretty cool. I also like crazy original products, and this is one of these. On the other side, the experience it offers can be too much intense, and not be suitable for everyone. If you asked me if I want to repeat the shooting game now, I would say “Absolutely not”. My brain categorized that as a slightly traumatic experience, something that I don’t want to try again. And this says a lot of the sensations this suit can evoke. I would never undergo days of training with this pain-inducing vest, it is too much.
I think OWO is up to something, and I like what it is doing, but all its success will depend on the calibration of the sensations it provides. Because if you feel too little pain, the shirt is useless, because you feel nothing. But if you feel too much, the VR experience becomes traumatic and you don’t want to do it anymore. It should find a very complicated sweet spot so that it hurts but not too much, something that is very subjective and different to evaluate. If they manage to do this, they can succeed, otherwise, no. Good luck to the OWO team.