High-Tech Jacket Makes This More Vivid

Moviemakers have a new tool to make your viewing experience more intense: a jacket wired with devices that use touch to stimulate the wearer, Fast Company reports. But the jacket is more than just the latest incarnation of smell-o-vision—rather than reproducing sensations being experienced by characters on screen, it uses touch to interact psychologically with the viewer.

The jacket might be programmed, for example, to send a shiver up your spine at the right moment, make your limbs feel tense, or simulate a pounding heartbeat at the most climactic moments. Only in the research phase now, the hardware is cheap enough that rentable touch jackets may be featured at theaters before long.