Woojer Vest 3 review — A new level of immersion

Immersion. It’s what we all strive to find in our games. We become Solid Snake taking down FOXHOUND in Metal Gear. We are Sam Fisher, sneaking through the darkest corridors to keep the world safe. We run down Metroids on Planet Zebes wearing the Power Suit of Samus Aran. We are those heroes, even for a brief moment while we inhabit those worlds, and it’s why we game. With the advances in virtual reality, we have new ways to experience our favorite games, experiencing near total immersion as our vision is plunged completely into games like Flight Simulator and Elite: Dangerous. That’s the top of the immersion chain, right? Well, not quite. Haptic feedback is the cornerstone of what makes games on the PlayStation 5 so incredibly immersive, and the team at Woojer understands that. They’ve taken six of their patented haptic transducers and packed them into a vest to take all immersion to the next level. Can sound you can feel be the next step? Let’s strap into the Woojer Vest 3 and find out.

I’m going to review the Woojer Vest 3 on its own merits, but stay tuned to the end of this review as I think I’ve found a pairing you’ll have to see to believe.

The first thing you should know about the Woojer Vest 3 is that it works for any audio experience. You can wire it into your phone, hook it into your home theater, connect it to your game console, connect it to your PC, or wire it into your VR setup. It doesn’t require a special app or software to work, instead interpreting audio between 1 and 250Hz and turning them into haptic feedback. It’s literally sound you can feel.

It’s a bit of a jaunt to the left, but I have a special circumstance that makes the Woojer products that much more compelling for me. I’m partially deaf. I lost the bulk of my hearing in a military accident where I was exposed to a massive explosion. It stole more than 3/4 of my hearing, destroying much of the high tones for me. The Woojer, much like the PlayStation 5’s DualSense haptics, helps me connect with a game despite what I’ve lost.

There are six brand new Series 3 Osci TRX2 haptic transducers in the vest – two on the sides, two in the back, and two in the front. With the vest on and buckled, these rest directly against your body so you absolutely will feel these thumping you. The vest is adjustable out to roughly 65 inches, with straps throughout, so it should fit a wide variety of folks. The whole rig weighs in at around 3 lbs – a full pound and a half lighter than previous models. That’s likely thanks to the shift to a reinforced breathable mesh that’s somehow both sturdier and lighter. Here’s a picture of Laura wearing the vest, ready for some game time.

The Woojer Vest 3 has a fast-charging Lithium-ion battery that, thankfully, charges with a USB-C cable. After 3 hours of charging from empty to full, I was ready to go. I found that the near-constant thrum of my Cessna engine in Flight Simulator 2020 gave me about 7 hours of playtime, and FPS games with the occasional thump of being shot or the concussion of a grenade pushed that number closer to roughly 8.

Aesthetically, the Woojer Vest 3 is absolutely gorgeous. From the odd angular box all the way to the vest itself, this thing looks and feels futuristic. The vest is mostly a heavy black webbing type fabric with black accents – truth be told, I miss the copper accents of its predecessor, but I digress. At the edges lie the padding that’ll rest on your shoulders and back. These are a fabric covered mesh with additional padding to help make sure it’s comfortable resting on your shoulders and back. The unit is a little stiff when it’s brand new, but after a little bit of use (and frankly, some time against the warmth of your body), it’ll loosen right up. That said, it is a bit warm. I personally don’t sweat while playing VR, for instance, but my wife’s reaction is very much the opposite. Adding the Woojer Vest 3 has her feeling a bit warm after about an hour, necessitating and overhead fan and lowering the AC a bit for her to continue to wear it. Me? I can wear it till the batteries run out. Your mileage, and temperature, may vary.

Music with the Woojer Vest 3 comes in three ways – Bluetooth 5.0, USB-C, or the TRRS (that’s the one with three black rings on them) 3.5mm jack. This should let you connect it to just about any device you’d like. I connected it to my Denon receiver, my Pixel phone (with an adapter, thanks Google), and my iPad Air (with an adapter again, thanks Apple). They all connected flawlessly and the vest sprang to life with every track I played. The differences came from what music I’d selected.

If you are a fan of easy listening and more mellow tracks, you’ll find the Vest 3 isn’t going to give you a lot in return. Even rock from the 60s and 70s gave me a little less than I expected, but that’s likely due to the quality of the original recordings. Jumping to the synth-powered 80s, the grumbling of the 90s, and the indie-rock of the 2000s kicks the vest into gear, latching onto the electronic sounds and the growl of grunge. 2010 brings with it distorted bass lines, dubstep, and genre mixing things like Trip-Hop and Trap. 2020s are just getting started, but the genres continue to merge, music tech continues to evolve, and the Woojer Vest 3 is here for it. Tracks like Get Lucky from Daft Punk, Bangarang from Skrillex gets the transducers moving, and Travis Scott is still a scumbag with no redeeming qualities. In short, heavier thumping tracks will give you more bang for your buck than your “Super Sounds of the 70s”.

Jumping to movies, there was only one film I wanted to watch – Dune. Hearing the Harkonnen battle language in the very beginning of the movie damned near rattled me out of my seat! The 2021 Dune movie is filled to the brim with bombastic and explosive moments, and adding the Woojer Vest 3 transformed one of my favorite movies into an absolute thrill ride. My reference film prior to Dune has long been the 4K version of Saving Private Ryan. The beach scene that starts the film is hard to watch, and adding the sharp crack of gunfire that you can physically feel makes it downright unsettling. It’s a hell of a thing, but it really adds to the impact of the film, if you can handle the inherent implication and intensity of it. I also popped in the incredible hallway fight scene (“Cut Man”) from Daredevil Season 1, Episode 2 is also one to check out as you feel like you are getting rocked all throughout that exhilarating exchange. Obviously you won’t get any of this watching the likes of The Life of Pets, but for action films, there’s nothing like it.

Connecting the vest for gaming is incredibly simple, whether it’s a Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, or PC are the easiest connections, given that you can just plug it in via the included 3.5mm jack directly into the console or your computer. Similarly, you can wire into any virtual reality headset in the same way. We decided to do precisely that when we jumped into Flight Simulator 2024. I could tell you about it, but it’s way more funny to see it in action:

At your left shoulder you have the primary control hub for the Woojer Vest 3. It’s a four-direction circular button layout that lets you adjust the volume or vibration up or down, as well as turn it on, naturally. Adjacent, you’ll also find LEDs that indicate the current status – charged and ready to go, red meaning it needs charging, and blue telling you that it’s in Bluetooth pairing mode. The Bluetooth 5.0 chip that powers that connection type is a Qualcomm CSR APTX processor. This processor is the heart of…oh…about 11 billion devices. This chip is ultra low-latency, and during testing I wasn’t able to detect any whatsoever. Especially in VR, the slightest bit of latency matters quite a bit, and the Vest 3 isn’t going to cause any problems there. This was backed up in our own experience where we could feel the sputter of the prop on our virtual Cessna at the same time it occurred in game, as one example.

The way the Woojer Vest 3 turns gameplay into a reaction is by frequencies alone. Game developers have not submitted a profile for their game to directly connect what’s happening on screen to the transducers – with two notable exceptions: Call of Duty and Fortnite. Both of these games have direct native support for the vest, and wow will you notice the difference. It really is hard to describe. The cheaper Woojer Strap will get you a single transducer with the same support, but let me emphatically say jumping to the vest is a whole different animal. Best of all, you don’t have to do anything for that support to kick in – simply start the game with the vest connected via a cable and get ready for something entirely new.

Call of Duty and Fortnite have direct support for the Woojer vest. I don’t play Fortnite, but I do enjoy a lil bit of Call of Duty, so I fired it up. There’s a bit of directionality to the thumps, which is helpful for sleuthing out where your enemies happen to be. The action happens rather quickly, so it can be hit or miss whether there’s additional utility to it, but it does add to the fun. Shooter fans will find a bit more immersion for their favorite games, but Call of Duty seems to have a bit more fidelity to the sound support.

Beyond the direct support, the Vest tries to interpret the distinct vibration frequencies that would work best for haptic feedback responses, and to that end the more rich the sound profile the better chance of that being accurate to the game. More specifically, a game supporting 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound is always going to give you better targeted haptic feedback more correctly than one that only supports stereo, for instance.

The Woojer Vest 3 is not unlike VR. It’s an additional peripheral that you have to charge and wear, true, but it also changes the game in a way no other peripheral could. As you can see above, we were able to raise immersion level even further than just virtual reality alone could. Driving games are the same way, with a jarring crunch when you accidentally spin off course and smack a barrier translating directly to the transducer on that side.

As with all of our hardware reviews, there’s one last stop, and it’s the one that might give you pause – warranty and price. The warranty on the Woojer Series 3 vest is 12 months, covering parts and labor. In addition, there’s a full 30-day money back guarantee. The warranty would normally give me pause, but I have one of the original pre-production transducers, as well as the first iteration of the belt and a first generation vest. All of those are still kicking to this day, speaking directly to the quality that Woojer has built into their products. The other part of the equation is the price. A Woojer Strap 3 will cost you around $179 (on sale for $129 at time of writing), so it makes sense that the Woojer Vest 3 is $499. You can get them for $399 if you catch it on sale. That is a tough sell since it effectively costs as much as a VR headset. That said, with growing native support for the device it could be a great addition to games like Fortnite and Call of Duty where that support already exists. The way we experienced Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was compelling as well. This is one of those devices that, once you try it you might find you have to have it, but your mileage may vary. They do offer a payment plan that takes some of the sting out of that price, if you are so inclined.

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