Immersive Gaming Experience with Woojer Haptic Vest 3
As I peered around the corner to see if SWAT had entered a doorway, I suddenly felt an explosion on the other side of the room. It triggered something primal in me, causing me to duck and spin around immediately and focus on a new entry point. As I stepped outside to investigate further, I could feel the rain pattering down on my torso with its subtle vibrations.
In his weekly column, Android Central Senior Content Producer Nick Sutrich delves into all things VR, from new hardware to new games, upcoming technologies, and so much more. It was a surreal sensation and one that I wasn’t expecting when I tried out the Woojer Haptic Vest 3 haptic vest for the first time. What started out as wonderment quickly turned into a minor addiction. What other games might deliver such tactile feedback, and what games would feel very different because of it?
A haptic vest takes the idea of controller rumble or haptics and elevates the experience by adding them to your whole torso. If you’re curious about the differences, here’s a great video that illustrates how a bHaptics vest feels specifically in Breachers. The vest and its accompanying wrist accessories will vibrate when you shoot a gun, grab an object, or get shot yourself. It’ll also vibrate specific parts of the vest if a grenade goes off near you, helping to simulate things you come in direct contact with.
The Woojer vest’s haptic motors operate entirely on sound. You can pipe the sound in either through a 3.5mm cable or via a wireless Bluetooth connection. From there, you’ll need to select an audio output, and you’ll have the same options: 3.5mm audio cable or Bluetooth. That means your audio source — whether it’s your Meta Quest 3 headset, your phone, or a gaming console — connects to the vest, and then your vest connects to your earbuds, headphones, or speakers.
The Woojer vest features its own battery pack, located on the back, which lasts approximately 8 hours on a single charge. The vest connects to the Woojer app on your phone, so as long as you’re using the app, you should always be aware of how much battery is left. This app also gives you control over audio sources and output, so you can specify which earbuds your audio outputs to.
Bluetooth audio introduces some latency, but I didn’t find this to be a problem even when playing VR games. The obvious reason for this is that haptic feedback is less important to your brain than visual or audio cues, particularly in VR, so a slight delay of 1/10th of a second from the action to the feeling won’t make you feel sick or anything like that.
Haptic intensity and volume can be adjusted either on the vest’s control panel, located in the location of a typical shirt pocket on the front of the vest, or via the Woojer app on the phone. The default haptic intensity is rather comfortable for me, but I’ve shown the vest off to some people who wanted to jack it up to get some extra feeling.
The vest itself is rather soft and comfortable, and while it certainly adds a bit of weight to your torso, this doesn’t feel like wearing a weighted vest at the gym. The material is quite breathable, but it will make you sweat a bit more during warm weather. In the winter, it feels particularly nice. Woojer sells some nice, breathable (and rather cool-looking) washable linings for about if sweat becomes a problem.
That brings me to the types of games you’ll want to use the vest for. You could use it for anything and everything, but I’ve found that games with specific tactile experiences work best. Think rhythm games like Beat Saber or Beatable, where the vest will let you feel the music as much as hear it.
Using the Woojer vest in shooters like Breachers or Contractors delivers a fascinating sense of immersion and environmental awareness that I didn’t expect. I used the wall breaching analogy earlier, where I felt the explosion on the other side of the room and was able to more quickly spin around and understand where the explosion came from than when I wasn’t wearing the vest.
Although it’s a bit more work to strap on a vest and plug in before gaming, there’s no chance I play most VR games without wearing the vest. Obviously, I’m not going to be strapping it on for Walkabout Mini Golf or strategy games like Civ VII VR, but everything else benefits immensely from the immersion factor of the vest.
I was skeptical going in, but Woojer made me a believer in its tech. Haptics enthusiasts and anyone seeking more immersion and spatial awareness in their games should definitely consider picking one up. That said, it is a fairly costly investment, comparable to the cost of a second Meta Quest 3S.
