”We want people to feel Bruce Lee’s anxiety about whether he will get out alive,” says 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.” During the fight scene, says Lemmens, the jacket will even create a pulsing on the wearer’s chest to simulate the kung fu master’s elevated heartbeat.
The actuators are capable of cycling on and off 100 times per second—more than enough to outpace the refresh rate of a computer screen or a TV set. But how are the researchers able to stimulate the entire upper body using only 64 actuators? Lemmens explains that the skin’s neural wiring and the way the brain perceives touch make that number sufficient. Though 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).
Asked if he and his colleagues have any plans to make a matching set of pants, Lemmens says no, but that the possible applications of this technology are limitless and that the emotion-inducing actuators could go anywhere.
This is not Philips’s first foray into heightening sensation. In October 2008, amBX, in Surrey, England, spun off from Philips to make gaming peripherals, including lighting-effects devices and wind machines that together can simulate the sensation of a gentle breeze or a bomb blast.
