#140 Zach Jaffe on SubPac’s tactile bass system for immersive sound

The Subpac tactile bass system gave me one of the most viscerally immersive experiences of my life, and it really blew my mind. I felt like it was feeling the pounding bass on the level of a dance club, but yet nobody around me could hear a thing.

I had a chance to demo a new SubPac designed specifically for VR on the streets of San Jose after a SVVRCon party. Lead Bass Officer Zach Jaffe was doing some guerrilla marketing giving VR developers demos, and it was one of the most immersive experiences I had at SVVRCon — and I wasn’t even using a VR HMD.

SubPac is simply takes the audio output of any audio and it converts the frequencies from 5Hz to 130Hz and converts it into vibrations in their wearable device. Your ears have difficulty hearing frequencies that low, and so we’re left to feel it in our body.

Zach told me that there’s some VR manufacturers who call SubPac one of their favorite VR peripherals just because it’s so elegant and easy to implement. You just literally feed the audio track that’s already in the experience into the SubPac receiver, and then put on the wearable unit. And that’s it. No SDK or any other specific integration is needed. And yet the benefits of immersion and presence of using something like the SubPac are going to be pretty incredible.

I’m really looking forward to hearing more about the VR-specific products from SubPac, and I’d highly recommend trying to find a demo of it at your next VR meetup. It’s really one of the most transformative experiences I’ve had in VR, and it speaks to the power of being able to use sound as a source of haptic feedback. #spreadBass

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