E-skin is a wearable VR controller that looks and feels just like a regular shirt

A new kind of Virtual Reality controller has been designed by the Xenoma company based in Japan that takes the form of a wearable shirt. It comes equipped with motion sensors allowing you to control your in game characters with movements of your upper torso. It’s currently being funded on Kickstarter and has less than a month left to get reach its $50,000 goal. Just imagine being able to control your character in a game with just your movement. The technology will soon be available to everyone.

E-skin is a shirt with sensors that has the ability to track your movement. When you’re wearing it, you send inputs to a computer using the movements of your body. Data from the shirt is sent through the attached e-skin Hub over Bluetooth. The obvious application here is for gaming and Virtual Reality. So, now you don’t have to be bound to old-fashioned controllers or even the more recent wand-like VR controllers. With the e-skin, your body moves your character.

The apparel moves and stretches with the body’s natural movements. With stretchable electronics that were developed to provide an intuitive and immersive input for interacting with virtual reality content and games. It’s even being developed as a means for analyzing exercise and sports. Since it is wireless and camera-free, e-skin can be used for many hours both inside and outside.

E-skin smart apparel was created by first focusing on the feel of the shirt so that it could maintain the “comfort, durability and machine washability of a regular shirt.” This was important to the designers who wanted to create a product that could be embraced by everyone. The Xenoma company believes that in the near future, connected clothing will be the most natural way for users to interact with the internet and even other people.

With less than a month to go in its campaign, e-skin has a ways to go to meet in fundraising goal of $50,000. A pledge of $479 will get you your own e-skin at early bird pricing. If all goes as planned backers will receive their e-skins starting in December of this year.

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