14 DAY TRIAL // The internationally renowned Dutch electronics company Philips has recently announced the creation of a new research platform that uses the sense of touch to bring cinematic experiences to the next level. The Philips Emotions Jacket relies on using the body's largest organ, the skin, for relaying the stimuli that characters receive on the screen right to the audiences. The Jacket is the first to be dedicated exclusively to making the skin part of the action, as previous devices only focus on the eyes and the ears, PhysOrg reports.
A part of the company's wider “sensory experiences” program, the Philips Emotions Jacket plans to carry on the tradition of trying to bring as much from the movie scenes into the living room as possible. The company has core competences in understanding human perception and behavior, so it plans to bring that to the table, creating a device that addresses the relatively unexplored areas of touching and feeling, rather than the visual and the auditive ones. Sensors and actuator technologies are slated to go into the Emotions Jacket, which promises to make watching movies more immersive and real than ever.
The research platform features a number of actuators in its arms and torso, which are constructed on designs taken over from the mobile-phone technology. They are evenly spaced throughout the garment and are activated in response to what goes on in various scenes. If emotions translate into butterflies in the stomach, and fear into a shiver down the spine, then Philips engineers believe that reverse-engineering them would also result in the associated emotion. For instance, you are watching a scary movie and see a horror scene. The Jacket will send “horror signals” down your spine in response.
“If you’re watching, say, a kung fu movie while wearing the Emotions Jacket, you won’t feel the physical punches and kicks, but you will experience the immense relief when the Kung Fu master escapes the evil henchmen,” Philips Research scientist Paul Lemmens says. The company highlights, however, the fact that the research platform is simply meant to be a device that assesses the connections between physical sensations and emotions, and adds that the end-product may not resemble a jacket that viewers need to wear at all times.