Assassin's Creed: Mirage comes with support for something called an OWO, which is a haptic vest. I had seen it mentioned here and there, this specific vest, but I wasn't super paying attention because I had a sense I already understood it. I do think they're cool - even the haptics possible on an iPhone are way more detailed than I expected, and the stuff that comes through a PS5 controller is startlingly detailed, but these are all novel motors wiggling something. This fuckin' vest apparently has "high conductivity electrodes that use electrical impulses" to wirelessly communicate a range of sensations from the prickles of insects to the entry and exit wounds of a bullet. It delivers these things to games via direct support (more rare currently, mostly indie) or mods (for higher profile games like Fortnite or Valorant).
The downside is that it costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars, but as a weird, niche device from a wholly dedicated company that's how all kinds of stuff starts out. I'm not saying everybody is going to wearing them soon, just that it's normal: I remember I bought a board for my PC back in the day called a "3dfx" that only had real support for a couple games, but it was pretty cool. It didn't do 2D though, so you had to run a cable between that and your regular video card. Then they started to kick real ass, and a company called nVidia tried to enter that nmarket even though the other guy had it all locked up! I wonder what they're doing now, thinking emoji.
I bet the OWO vest feels very, very bad to use, which is to say, I bet it does exactly what it's supposed to.
VR is where it makes the most sense. Of course it would get this kind of press right about the time people decided the metaverse was probably not going to be any kind of verse at all. Check out their "Sensations" page, that offers such delights as Daggers, Axes, or Severe Abdominal Wounds. It also offers a car idling, and driving at high speeds, which is probably the perfect use case for the device. There's something called Strange Sensation, too, which… I mean, I'm down.
(CW)TB out.
