Gadgetory

hey this is Knicks chat with the verge and I'm using the Z nama smart shirt motion controller it's a smart shirt with sensors that lets you control a character in a video game by moving your real body so this whole product category they're calling East skin now Xena ma is a company based in Tokyo now they've been developing these Iskandar shirts for the last couple of years for a number of different use cases this one very clearly looks like it's for gaming but they're also developing ones for fitness so they have pants and fleece is for runners and other and other athletes they also have one for health care so they have sensors built into the middle of the shirt for tracking your respiratory system for doing EKG tests this one I'm wearing right now basically has a bunch of sensors only for controlling movement so it takes the movement of my arms my chest area my shoulders translating the ingame movement for a video game character so that when I move like this my character runs when I jump in it senses that my body is going vertically it'll make my character in the game jump in the virtual world now this shirt may look like kind of like a spider-man costume crossed with an Iron Man suit but actually it's pretty practical each one of these silver lines here are sensors and these sensors go all the way from the wrist all the way up to the chest area all throughout the torso and they communicate or they send data to this thing right here this module right here which has Bluetooth built in now this then translates the movements my body makes to a PC or smartphone turns them into in-game movements now the game itself is pretty rudimentary they're not game developers they're making smart clothing but they did make a pretty challenging game it was a quite an intense workout you really have to move your arms fast and jumping in the mix there is definitely not easy I don't think I'm gonna work out this hard and see yes ever again and I kind of don't want to now the movements aren't super super natural the first time I played the game I tried to move my hips I tried to move my shoulders and the cofounders of the company here told me that's not exactly how it works it's really more about moving your two limbs your arms in a very very even consistent motion and then speeding up as fast as you can to kind of make your character run faster but the game itself is more of a proof-of-concept zina mother company is planning on selling this shirt for around four to five hundred dollars for consumers but that's coming later this year there's no release date yet and they haven't locked down pricing right now if you're a developer and you want to develop apps using the East skin technology you can buy a shirt and and get access to their SDK for $5,000 if you want to see more embarrassing videos of me covering the cutting edge smart clothing and CES check out the verge comm or subscribe to us on YouTube at youtube.com slash The Verge I don't know it's it's definitely the tightest shirt I think I've ever worn in my life