The following ‘Woojer Vest 4’ equipment was provided by the manufacturer for review purposes.
You ever wonder what it feels like to get shot? Stabbed? Eviscerated? Don’t answer that in earnest, please, for the five of us with said bit of morbid curiosity. But, if you’ve ever wanted to feel a bigger “impact” that goes beyond the controller you hold or the headphones blasting your favourite goth rock, well I’ve good news—the Woojer Vest 4 is pretty good at that sort of thing, using a set of oscillators that build a full three-hundred and sixty degree haptic feedback device that fits squarely on your trunk. It fits nice and snug for what it is and it is probably one of the best additions you could add to your virtual reality experiences.
Others, not so much, and this little vest does come with its own hefty caveats—but I’ll touch on those momentarily. Even still, I quite liked keeping this thing on and I’ll likely continue to use mine for the foreseeable future.
The Woojer Vest 4 comes in the right sized box for the job and just about everything in it can be recycled or reused for something, which I very much appreciate. Pop out the vest and you’ll also find a 3.5mm cable and a charging head and USB-C cable. Keep this one specifically for the Vest as the company highly emphasises that you do not use any other heads or cables. Another big caution they’ve tossed on there is to make sure that you do not use the USB-C audio port to charge the device and to make sure that cable goes into the back of the unit.
Though I was tempted to plug in my phone’s ultra-fast charger, I decided it was better that I don’t break the vest before I got to use. I plugged it into the wall and waited the three hours the little pamphlet wanted me to wait for. In the meantime, I flipped thru the manual and got an idea of how this thing works. See, Woojer Vest essentially converts a digital or analog audio signal through any 3.5mm AUX port or a USB-C connection for use with PCs. Audio is passed thru to the transducer on the vest and the six oscillators spread out across the vest activate based on the direction of the sound (left or right channels) and the intensity of the sound being delivered.
Take for example the above. This is a spectrogram reading of SAN-Z Studio, HOYO-MIX, and YMIR’s song “Peak” from ‘Zenless Zone Zero’ (you can listen to it here to follow along to the gram reading). Without going into an insane amount of detail, I want you to pay attention to the peak highs of the image: those are the beats you will be feeling the most in the Woojer Vest, which is both good and bad. See, impacts are typically associated with those higher frequencies, and (for example) some games will emphasise a “punch” with a high frequency impact sound effect. Some games won’t and as a result, the impact won’t be as “punch-ey” as you might have hoped.
But before I get to more examples of that, lemme fish up my set up experience.
You’ll need a mandatory firmware upgrade in order to use the Woojer Vest. This is delivered via the Woojer Devices app on iOS and Android, which is something you should be aware of. The app experience was lovely, for the most part anyway—hooking up the Vest to my aging iPhone 11 worked like a charm and the update didn’t take too long. But it did “fail” on completion, which concerned me a bit until the thing rebooted and worked just fine from thereon out. Love me some momentary panic!
Here are the Woojer Vest’s settings within the app. Here, you can adjust the volume of the output and its intensity of the haptic feedback provided by the vest. you can also adjust the LED ring’s brightness and colour scheme and also pair headphones to the vest via Bluetooth. Again, most “input” devices such as the Meta Quest 3/console/PC must be connected via the 3.5mm AUX port on the more visible Woojer LED ring. But, the Android/iOS device that has paired to the vest can also wirelessly transmit music to the vest for use with music playback if would so like.
Honestly, the whole Woojer Vest set-up experience is quite nice, but it almost skirts the line of hackneyed due to the way it works around the operating systems and devices that connect to it. Also, I’ve not picked up an electronic that has explicit red tape and warnings plastered on it in quite a while!
Besides the near-painless setup, the Woojer Vest is really good at what it does. It features a quality fabric and the straps give you enough control to push the shoulders of the vest against your check and lower trunk. It does take a bit of time to get the right fitting though as ideally, you want your breasts to feel the impact of the haptics just as much as your back, so take the time to fit it just right especially if you’ve let your gut grow again these last past week (a painful reminder of my own doing).
And I forgot to smile in all the shots I took!
Let me cut to the chase here: this vest works the best when you’re playing in virtual reality. I spent a good amount of time mucking about with ‘Resident Evil 4 VR’ and ‘Batman: Arkham Shadow’ along with other titles like ‘Path of Fury: Episode I‘. The best experience was easily Resident Evil, where I felt the intensity of the game’s music and atmosphere pushing both sides of the vest and even conversations got a tad tingly when Leon asserted his dominance. Batman’s punches felt good, but the atmospheric music is what really drove the feedback on the vest. And last, for Path of Fury, the vest didn’t really add much besides being an extra weight on my back.
And that’s the thing with this Woojer Vest—its experience is wholly dependent on the software or music you’re playing. Some games just won’t blow you away as you would have liked. In some games it becomes obnoxious, such as when I was playing ‘Darkest Dungeons II’ where the vest did nothing but vibrate for an hour on end. I did listen to music through this thing and found it to be a fun experience, just like those “spacial” DSPs you can apply with certain headphones to get 3D sound and the like. For some songs, such as Chevy & Robin’s “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers“, having a deep feedback vest driving those beats of acoustic and rich vocals almost makes it feel like I’m at a fan concert with hundreds of others. It’s actually really fun to listen to music this way.
On the other hand, it’s clear that the passthrough being done on this vest isn’t the best quality. Many of my songs struggled to be played through this vest, causing crackles when pushing ranges higher than 18-20hHz and that is unacceptable for me. You won’t notice this while gaming, but my music collection consists of many masters that strangle my headphones and surround system and to see them sullied while playing thru the vest ultimately made me put the Woojer away.
The Woojer Vest 4 also has one particular issue I’m not a fan of: the ring with the LED lights becomes uncomfortably warm (if not hot) after a mere 20 minutes of use. It doesn’t matter whether its blasting feedback constantly or just idling, you’ll notice the heat this thing is putting out pretty quickly and I found myself taking frequent breaks as a result. I can handle 40 celsius temperatures with little issue, but I’m not keen on having my right breast (think medical measurements!) lit up. This heat was somewhat negated when I went out for a jog and a bike ride, with Chicago’s swampy wintery weather keeping the cold somewhat at bay, but at-home use I would keep caution. Especially for older folks.
Though piggy-backing off the jogging and biking comment for a moment, the Vest 4 doesn’t get in the way of exercise as much as I thought it would! It’s still a bit hefty, so I’d keep that in mind, but as long as you tie it proper around your waist you should be good as gold. Battery life is fairly lengthy as far as I’ve noticed, but I haven’t quite done an exact test on length due to the aforementioned heat problem.
The Woojer Vest 4 does one job and does it well: if you’re blasting tunes or an impact-heavy game slash film, you’ll feel it whether its being driven from the left or right side. In a way, it’s almost euphoric and I think it’s an exciting addition for people who frequently play in virtual reality or even watch and listen to action films and music. It is a pricey beast, though, and not all experiences will benefit from the haptic feedback. More frustratingly, the heat issue can be bothersome and may impact your play time as a result.
Still, if you’ve extra cash and are looking to add a punch to your media consumption, you’re not going to find anything better than this. ∎
Woojer Vest 4
PROS
- One size fits all is snug!
- Material is of good quality and the device doesn't feel cheap.
- Good in-app experience and set up.
- Works great with virtual reality.
CONS
- Not every experience is enhanced - depends on the media you use.
- Audio output is not of good quality for high-frequency music.
- Heat dissipation makes sessions longer than a half-hour feel uncomfortable.
