With virtual reality set to become more of 'a thing' in our day to lives from gaming with the Oculus Rift and PS4 Morpheus, to possibly mixing VR with augmented reality with Microsoft's HoloLens plonking VR in the physical space of your living room – it seemed only a matter of time before one company proffered the idea of a full-body VR experience.
Sounding more like a piece of kit from a William Gibson novel than an actual real-world device, The Tesla Suit purports to offer full-body virtual reality immersion, which means aside from surrounding the user with visuals that obliterate the outside world, the suit would allow them to 'feel' sensations in the VR space.
Technically, The Tesla Suit isn't really a suit; rather it's a series of sensors that allow the user to feel the sensation of movements in the VR space, changes in temperature and the like. Tesla Studios puts it like this:
"The full body Tesla Suit consists of a belt (with a central control unit) together with modular units – haptic feedback gloves, vest and trousers – and will be fully compatible with existing virtual reality headsets such as the Oculus, Google Glass and META Space Glasses, as well as consoles (PSP, Xbox), PC and smartphones."
The Suit's main application - from what we can glean - seems to be geared towards the gaming space, but that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be limited to that. It's still in the development stage at this point, but Tesla Studios says it aims to have the first modules on the market in 2015. We have no idea what it'll cost (and, let's be honest, a 2015 launch seems very optimistic), but we're guessing you'll need to save a lot of bottlecaps for it. [Tesla Studios]