Logitech and Herman Miller team up to make Embody gaming chair

Buying a chair that goes with your gaming desk is really difficult. According to an informal poll I recently conducted on Twitter, finding the right chair to buy was right behind figuring out which PC components to buy for a DIY desktop build in terms of complexity.

Unlike the components, there are no benchmarks for the chairs. Comfort is completely subjective, and even then it’s hard to find reliable reviews. Also, most of them look like racing chairs that mean more looks than ergonomics. So you could spend a lot and pray that it works or just get a cheaper chair and funnel the rest of that money into a GPU upgrade, faster storage, or a bigger monitor. As a regular full-time babysitter in an AmazonBasics office chair, I fit into the latter group.

Herman Miller, the company responsible for those amazing (very expensive) office chairs, wants you and me to take our health more seriously while we play. To try to convince us, he teamed up with Logitech to make the Embody gaming chair. It’s a high-end model that inherits almost everything about Herman Miller’s beautiful and pre-existing Embody chair, including its focus on comfort and style support, as well as an equally outrageous price of $ 1,495. This model makes only a few changes to the original version, the most notable of which is the change to a completely black color with some subtle blue accents. It also has copper-infused foam on its back cushion that aims to keep you cooler while you play.

Grid view

The Embody looks very different from other gaming chairs that are more likely to resemble seats in a Fast and Furious car. It is minimalist in the use of materials and has a low-profile design. However, Herman Miller says it can make a big difference to your physiology while playing. Its striking design was molded by input from doctors and doctors, and the company claims it can help lower your heart rate while sitting. There are over 150 small supports around the chair, and these apparently allow blood to flow more easily to the regions that are generally pressed into most chairs, such as the butt, lower back, and legs. In my experience, an added benefit of this design is that I don’t feel fatigued when I get up to get out of the chair.

The Embody has several smart features that help you customize it. It is comfortable to sit down right away, but I customized a few things to fit my body. First, there is a rotary knob on the right rear of the chair that adjusts the angle of the backrest. Turning counterclockwise tilts you back slightly and helps support curved backs better, while turning clockwise straightens your back and tilts it slightly forward, which may help some players who want to feel more agile in the fast paced games.

On the left rear side of the chair, there is a four-step level that adjusts how much recline you have. The nice thing about this is that it’s not an all-or-nothing switch for reclining, so I never bothered to fly backwards out of the chair. One notch down gives you a little recline, two notches gives you a little more, and so on. If you want to adjust the tilt tension, making it less resistant to leaning back or more, there is a knob under the right armrest that controls that directly. On that same knob, there’s a joystick in the middle, and all it does is lower and raise the chair’s hydraulics when you push it in any direction.

For someone who’s always used a bargain chair, there are a few game-changing features with Embody. The armrests can be raised and lowered, as well as moved from side to side to change their angle by holding down the blue triggers. This makes it easy to seamlessly switch from using a laptop, where my arms are naturally closer together, to my desk, which has more space between where my arms rest on the mouse and keyboard. Herman Miller cited that some players prefer chairs without armrests, and those on the Embody find compromise by being able to drop almost as low as the seat cushion.

I also love the extendable seat. By lifting the front corners of the seat, the edge can be extended to tuck below the knees or pull toward the thighs. Another little thing that I really appreciate is that the seat section remains stationary when I lean back. With my feet firmly planted on the floor at all times, it is good to be able to push the chair back without my whole body lifting off the floor. They sound like really small things to talk about, but it’s often the little details that make the difference and allow manufacturers like Herman Miller to charge for what they do for office furniture.

Okay, but what about the player specific characteristics I talked about? Almost everything I have mentioned so far is applicable to the original Embody chair. The changes are relatively minor, all said. In addition to the chair’s new color, sleek blue accents, and copper-infused material inside the back cushion, all he did was strike a large “G” from Logitech’s gaming division near the neck and hang a label on the back to show that it is indeed for gamers.

It may sound silly, but I don’t think anything else needs to be done. When a well-known furniture maker and one of the largest gaming accessory companies throws a chair into the ring, the industry will take notice. Whether you are buying the Embody gaming chair or not, this is a good thing for general players buying chairs in the future. We’ll probably see other chair manufacturers influenced by their design and focus on comfort and staying healthy while playing soon. Hopefully this will result in more options for players than the popular racing seats with rigid padding. And hopefully they won’t cost as much as this.

Will the Embody gaming chair make you a better player? I mean, the price of $ 1,495 has to guarantee something, right? Truth be told, very few gaming products have an immediate impact, at least for me. What generally makes the difference to me with peripherals are usually not the extra buttons or a fast USB polling speed. It is comfort, and the Embody has it in spades. Comfort in itself won’t exactly make you a better player, but it kept the right kind of pressure on my body so I could fully relax and invest in what’s on screen. If your livelihood as a professional gamer, or even your enjoyment as an enthusiast, is focus based and spends many hours in the game, your investment here will pay off faster than it will for most people.

That doesn’t mean that everyone else wouldn’t enjoy it. My standard chair gives me about an hour of comfort before I’m ready for a break, and I generally feel a little sore when I get up. Personally, sitting for hours isn’t fun, though, but the Embody gaming chair is better than most others because it just comes off when you use it. If you have the opportunity to try it, it will spoil you forever.

Photography by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge