D-Box: Rumble in the Stufflive jungle

Posted by Ben

November 13, 2008

Having been tired out by playing with gadgets all day we came across the D-BOX stand and took a welcome sit down in their new chair specifically designed for watching action movies.

The idea of experiencing the feeling of an £11,000 movie chair was an offer Gaj-it just couldn’t pass up so when it came our turn to take a seat we were filled with schoolboy excitement.

Make no mistake this is no normal chair, and for eleven grand we’d hope not. This beast is designed specifically for watching action movies – it will work with any movie that contains the correctly encoded information, and whilst the catalogue is a little limited at the moment, most if not all 20^th century Fox films will come with this requisite data included for the future. Given the task of storing such large amounts of data only a Blu Ray disc currently offers capacity enough in bringing this seat-shaking experience to life.

Unfortunately we didn’t get to watch a whole movie, but we did get to see a few scenes from IRobot in all its rumblicious glory and as big gaming fans we know the difference that physical feedback can make in enhancing the gaming experience, so why should it be any different for movies?

For the couple of scenes that we saw it was a positive experience, the movements and rumble of the chair definitely added to the enjoyment but we do wonder if it would get a bit tiring or even nauseating after too long in the seat, so to speak.

In reality the chair’s movements reminded us of the way that those large, ride-in simulators move. The difference is that on those the slightly jarring motion only lasted a few minutes, with this chair it could conceivably last hours.

We did express these concerns and the chirpy D-BOX crew suggested that it wasn’t really the best environment, given all the extra noise, lighting and various other distractions and to be fair, we tend to agree – given the opportunity to become completely involved in the movie experience perhaps the movements would feel more natural.

It’s not solely in the action scenes where the chair provides feedback; there are far more gentle movements present in the subtle scenes and here, say, in a horror movie we could definitely see the tension being enhanced no end.

Without the opportunity of watching a whole film, we’d have to reserve judgement and obviously with a price tag beyond most consumers spending power it’s clearly aimed at home cinema set ups (at the very least) and so to judge it on 5 or 10 minutes at Stufflive show floor would be a little mean.

One of the most exciting things for us is that D-BOX also works on a range of gaming products, we can’t wait to get the chance to check those out too! Did we mention that we were huge gaming fans??

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