Zap Zap VR!

VR Researchers have found a use for electric shocks – to make you feel walls that don’t exist.

Researchers at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany have been hard at work finding ways to make you feel like you have bumped into a wall in the virtual world and make you feel it in the real world by giving you a bit of good old electrical muscle stimulation – a shock of electricity basically.

You wear the usual headset/tracking gloves, but you have an additional muscle stimulator and computer in a back back, then electrodes attached to your arm activate muscles causing them to twitch and move by themselves if they hit a wall in the VR world.

As well as highlighting when you have ‘bumped into something’ it can also eventually be used to stimulate the feeling of lifting something. By shocking opposition muscle groups in a users arms it makes them feel resistance, simulating gravity. More electrical simulation, the heavier an object feels.

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!