Getting punched is no fun. But if, for some strange reason, you want to experience more of it, then your luck is in: the Human-Computer Interaction lab at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany has created impacto, a device that recreates the experience of being hit in Virtual Reality.
OK, it doesn’t actually recreate the pain (luckily, we’d say). But it does reproduce the effect of a punch’s impact, by moving your hand backwards, as if hit.
“It renders the tactile aspect of being hit by tapping the skin using a solenoid,” the lab explains. “It adds impulse to the hit by thrusting the user’s arm backwards using electrical muscle stimulation.”
Why on earth would you want that? For sport, the lab claims: it has created three Virtual Reality sports simulators to demonstrate the potential use of impacto, employing an Oculus Rift for visuals and a Kinect for tracking.
They are boxing, football and baseball. And if you’d choose the former for your demonstration then you’re certainly braver than us.