If you haven’t heard of the Emo Jacket, just think of “the feelies” from Brave New World. If you haven’t read that book, just imagine watching your favorite movie, but you can feel what the main character of the film feels.

In Aldous Huxley’s classic science fiction novel, this “feelie” process was accomplished by the user holding onto a small ball-shaped interface near their seat. Sadly, the interface is not that simple with the Emo Jacket, which requires wearing a jacket with a lot of independent actuators.

There are about 64 of these actuators in all, and they create the illusion of being touched in spots below the neck and above the belt. They are arranged in 16 groups of 4 across the arms and torso, and 8 of these are spaced 6 inches apart and located on each sleeve.

When the user plays a DVD, certain signals that are encoded on the disc are transmitted on the jacket wherever the main character is feeling it during the film. I have heard that there are limits that it will do, so if the main character gets punched in the chest, you won’t be feeling the pain of that.

The Emo Jacket reminds me of the D-box chair that I experienced at CES. I sat in this and watched the opening scene from Bolt and special motion-coded sensors allowed me to feel every explosion.

So, what movies would you like to watch with the Emo Jacket? I would imagine they would have to be one where the main character is being touched on his (or her) chest. Yeah, I guess romances would be under this category.

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