For more than a decade, whenever 26-year-old Lauren Fox watched live music, she would focus on the vibrations of one instrument.
"Your brain is very, very flexible and it likes to link information together to build its model of the world," he tells "The problem people hit was that — you can imagine especially in older people — putting on a big suit like that is not something they're necessarily going to want to do every day," Dr Fletcher says.
"People love this — the amazing amount of detail they can get out of the vibrations of the vest," says Kylie Davies, the director of creative production company The Newmarket Collective, which began supplying haptic vests to various Australian events this year. He says haptic devices, by contrast, could be a more accessible option as they don't require "any advanced healthcare infrastructure" and are relatively low-cost to manufacture.
"Within the last five years, because having Auslan interpreters at events is becoming more prevalent … more events are accessible to us. But now having the haptic vest as well, it makes it far more accessible than it was," she says.