Do gaming chairs vibrate? Not yet, they dont
We are through the looking glass, here
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Do gaming chairs vibrate? The answer is no. By and large, gaming chairs are just slightly fancy-looking office chairs, with large price tags, supposedly justified by their generally superfluous features.
However, it’s not a silly question to ask. Controllers have vibrated since 1997 when Nintendo released the Rumble Pak accessory for the N64. Some people thought it was a gimmick, but with vibration, also known as force-feedback being ubiquitous these days, clearly, it was not.
So became the haptic feedback arms race, with eachh and every console company trying to outdo the competition. PlayStation joined in with their DualShock controllers soon after for the PS1, and have continued a march on haptic feedback to this day with the variable resistance triggers of the DualSense PS5 controller.
PC gaming, by comparison, has been fairly stagnant when it comes to additional immersion technologies, sure, there have been vibrating gaming mice, like the SteelSeries Rival 700, but PC gamers have continued to stick with standard gaming keyboards and mice.
Vertagear PL4800 gaming chair
Max load
163kg/360lbs
Recommended height
175cm-198cm/5’9″-6’6″
Height adjustability
1355mm-1430mm/53.3″-56.2″
This is typically due to the more competitive nature of PC gaming. If it doesn’t help you reach peak performance, there is no point. However, companies will always try to spin a gimmick into a vital feature, which is starting to happen with gaming chairs too.
Do gaming chairs vibrate? Give it a couple of years.
Of course, as with any new gimmick, you need only look to gaming peripheral companies for the new stuff. Peripheral brands love jumping on a bandwagon, continuing to do so over and over, just in case this one turns out to be the next big thing. They are a lot like cryptocurrency people in this respect.
Here come our usual suspects, Cooler Master and Razer. back in early 2022, they both revealed their haptic gaming chair concepts, the Motion 1, and Enki Pro Hypersense, respectively.
Secretlab Titan EVO 2022 Series
Height range (Medium Size)
5’6″ – 6’0″
Maximum load
286lb/129kg
Seat width
56cm
Tilt-lock?
Yes
Height adjustment range
75mm
These products not only purport to vibrate, but they have actuators in the base that can actively throw the chair around in response to in-game events. Sort of like a less-custom version of those hydraulic racing sims.
Of course, since then, both of these concepts have remained just that, concepts. As is the case with concepts, we don’t know when of if they’ll be available for the consumer to buy. However, we do know that haptics gaming chairs are soon to make it to the mainstream. Should be fun, probably.
