It’s been pretty well established at this point that I like gimmicky things… well, as far as video games are concerned. So it shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that I’ve accumulated several wacky things in my gaming journey. One of the wackiest is the Aura Interactor.
The Interactor is a vest that you strap to your back. You then plug the audio into a brick that you’ve plugged the sound from your favorite audio device into (usually a video game console, but you could also plug it into anything that outputs sound: portable game console, stereo, iPod, Walkman, whatever).
And no, I don’t have any pictures of me wearing the thing, it’s kind of snug these days.
But the general idea is that the brick takes the sound from whatever you’ve plugged into it, filters out everything but the bass (which supposedly just leaves impacts from punches, kicks, cars, spaceships, or whatever), and then transfers a spine-rattling rumble to the backpack. And I do mean spine-rattling. The thing rattled me so hard that my vision actually wobbled. It was definitely a unique experience, and predated the N64’s Rumble Pak by quite a few years.
I could only find two problems with the thing:
1. They didn’t make it in an adult size and
2. Since the device filters out everything but the bass-sounds, you don’t really get any of the sounds from the game. So you’re playing a mostly silent game and getting clobbered in the back every few seconds… Which is weird, yeah.
If you really want to get some more information about the thing, you could check here.