This haptic shirt shocked me at CES and I’m not sure I hated it

You and technology are the only reasons I would put up with being shocked by a haptic shirt at CES 2023.

I visited OWO on the floor of CES to try out the company’s new haptic sleeves, for which it won a CES innovation award. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that those less radical wearables weren’t ready for testing yet. No, OWO had its second-skin haptic shirt, which is basically a Lycra t-shirt with threads sewn into it, ready to go.

The company’s CEO, Jose Fuertes, explained to me that the shirt has no pressure-based haptics. Instead, it delivers low-power electrical pulses to the muscles in your abdomen, back, arms, and chest to simulate a wide variety of physical effects. The company is in talks with most major game studios to license the technology.

With the shirt on, you felt a knife stabbing your chest or a bullet entering your stomach and exiting your back. You felt the recoil of a shotgun. This is what Fuertes promised. Naturally, I was intrigued, especially when I learned that the $399 (€399) haptic shirt was only in relatively few hands since the product doesn’t officially ship in the US and Europe until February.

I wanted to try. I mean, I thought so.

OWO representatives directed me to a privacy booth where I could take off my shirt and undershirt. The shirt’s very sticky electrodes need skin contact to work.

They measured my chest, but when I put them on second skin, I found it incredibly tight. They told me a tight fit was best. With difficulty I zipped up the front. Then someone from OWO placed a somewhat bulky battery pack in a pocket near my stomach, added a contact point to each arm, and also zipped up the sleeves.

The shirt offers nine parameters of electric waves based on an algorithm of sensations. This means there is some calibration to ensure that the sensation for each type of haptic effect is to your liking.

I stood with the OWO representative as he used the Bluetooth-connected app to calibrate sensations at each muscle location and for a variety of sensations.

At first I felt nothing. Then he gradually increases the intensity and I got a sharp and not exactly pleasant tingling feeling in my arm or stomach, for example.

When he turned the digital knob too high, I cringed. But in the end we got it all in what I thought was an acceptable range.

Then I put on a Quest 2 VR headset and started playing a game where I was attacked by drones.

Suddenly I felt a sting in my arm, I was shot by a drone that entered on my left. Soon I was shooting down drones as I was battered by their hits and the increasingly painful stings of the haptic shirt.

The fusillade culminated in a large black drone flying straight at my head and exploding inches from my face. My entire torso lit up in pain.

I heard the OWO ask if I wanted to try a different game. I answered a little too quickly: “NO!”

I pulled myself out of the shirt and pulled off at least one electrode that seemed to be fused to my skin. For an hour after that experience, I could feel the phantom pain of those pulses. Was this company’s name OWO or “Ow Ow Ow”?

Jose Fuertes ran up to me before I left and asked, “Do you like it?!” Seeing my uncertainty, he said that now that I know what it was like, I would have a better experience doing it again. I was not sure. I have a feeling that the sleeves, which limit the sensations of fishing and throwing a ball at your arms, may eventually prove more popular.

Still, I can see the point of something like the OWO Haptic Gaming system for combat training and hardcore gamers who want that extra level of dedication.

For me? It wasn’t love, but it wasn’t hate either.

View our CES 2023 hub for all the latest from the show as it happens. We cover everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops and smart home gadgets, so stay with us for the big stories.