Creating an Immersive Experience: Haptic Jackets Enable Deaf Audiences to Enjoy Orchestral Concerts

Violins resonate in the rib cage, cellos and double bass resonate at a point just below the body, shoulders feel the brass instruments, wrists detect the solos, one of the methods acoustics expert Patrick Hanlon chose to program his haptic jackets to enable deaf or hard-of-hearing audiences to Enjoying an orchestral concert.

During a concert in Manhattan, attendees had the opportunity to wear wireless touch-screen jackets containing 24 vibration points that reproduced music performed on stage. The idea of ​​the jacket designers is to reproduce the function normally performed by the eardrum, particularly its role in transmitting sound frequencies to the bone. These amplified frequencies then become nerve impulses.