How tech is changing the cinema experience

Audiences have been enthralled by moving picture shows for over a century. Nothing captivates us like living vicariously through the lives of heroes and anti-heroes. We love to take journeys with them as they save the world and romp towards the horizon with a beautiful princess in tow. As social influences grow and cinematic technology advances, cinema power-players have sought to bring us closer to being a part of the action. D-Box motion seats are the next step in the evolutionary process of bringing cinema to life, or breathing more life into cinema, depending on how you look at it.

The next step in theatre tech

D-Box technology offers movie-goers a hybrid of story telling and an amusement park ride. The plush seats are numbered, so there is no threat of arriving late and being forced to crane your neck into an inhuman position from the front row. Each D-Box also features its own drink holder, so you don’t have the worry of sipping on a stranger’s tepid Arnold Palmer. The reigning feature of the D-Box seat is, of course, the ability to literally move you, to feel the action in every frame of a film. The seats are equipped with the ability to vibrate, shake and feel the action. D-Box seats also offer each viewer the ability to adjust the vibration settings according to your comfort. If the action gets too real, you can always turn down the settings just before a plane crashes or a bomb goes off.

Save the world without leaving your seat

The magical D-Box ride is no simple feat to accomplish. The experience is more than just some vibrating settings being slapped onto a mechanical chair. Each seat is painstakingly coded to correspond with every second of the movie, frame by frame. Take, for example, Michael Bay’s Transformers: the D-Box has the ability to bring you up the sides of the buildings as Optimus Prime fights the Decepticons, or blast off on a wild chase with Bumble Bee. You can help Sam Witwicky save his girlfriend du jour without ever having to leave your seat. In fact, it seems a technology tailor-made for an action-packed Michael Bay film.

The fans rejoice

New technology is often met with duelling choruses of nay-sayer and devotees alike, although D-Box seems to have a resoundingly positive effect on novice users. The tickets are pricier than regular tickets, but operational costs are higher, and the experience is on a much different level than a trip to a traditional theatre.

Movie and TV reviewer Timothy Guy for The Press Enterprise reviews his experience with D-Box technology for the film The Expendables 2, commenting, “Explosions? A bit more. A great [part] of the film in D-Box comes with vehicles on screen. At the start of the film, a caravan of armoured vehicles make their way into a compound. The seats not only shake as the caravan moves, but actually move to the left and right as the vehicles do.”

Whether you’re a die hard Michael Bay fan or are just curious enough to get your feet wet experiencing a Nicholas Sparks film, it’s a technology worth trying out.