Hasta La Ideas

The unusual Massage Me gaming interface, cooked up by University of Art and Industrial Design Linz students Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson, is a vest embedded with sensors on the back. As you can see in the photo above, pressing on the back of the vest controls the on-screen movements of the game. “Otherwise wasted button-pushing energy is transformed into a massage and the addicted game player becomes an inexhaustible masseur,” the creators explain.

The soft flexible buttons are made from layers of conductive fabric and are embedded in the back of the jacket. These buttons register the massage moves and interpret them before passing them on to the console as control signals. This means that Massage me works with existing games, and the best massages come from playing games that require the player to press a lot of buttons and combinations.
Although Massage me currently works with a hacked a Playstation Controller, we believe it wouldn’t be hard to convert it to other consoles by hacking their controllers.

I’m not sure if I want someone who’s playing Tekken to have their hands anywhere near my vertebrae, but you gotta give this one an A for originality.

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