Motion-synced movies have arrived

Our week of porn continues, although today's post is only tangentially related to adult entertainment. Last night I had the pleasure of checking out a demo from D-Box, a Montreal-based company that is adding motion-synced seats to the movie-viewing experience.

I first had a chance to learn about D-Box at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas back in early 2008. At the time, the company was only making seats for home users, with theaters just an ambition. Well, D-Box is now hitting the big time. They've already installed seats in theaters in eight different U.S. markets and, with the opening of the new Harry Potter movie on July 15, we can add Canada to that list. The Queensway Cineplex in Toronto has added a row of D-Box chairs, 18 seats, to one of its theaters.

The seats use motors to simulate the motion happening in the movie, which has been coded to work with the chair. I first experienced it in Vegas with a short clip from Polar Express while last night's demo was about 15 minutes of master thespian Vin Diesel's latest car porn movie, Fast and Furious. Both times, the experience was really cool. A motion-synced movie is pricey, $7 extra, but I'm betting tickets at the Queensway will be impossible to get. Here's a short video showing what it looks like at home, although it is considerably more fun than the guy in the clip makes it appear:



It's great to see a Canadian tech company starting to make it - I'm betting D-Box's seats are going to spread like wildfire, especially considering that theaters are looking for ways to lure people away from pirated downloads. The technology will be really amazing when it's combined with 3D, and yes, D-Box CEO Claude Mc Master says that's coming.

The porn connection comes from the fact that both mainstream and adult movie studios are working on beefing up the viewing experience in order to fight piracy. While the mainstream is going with un-pirateable technologies like 3D and motion-sync, porn producers are going with teledildonics, like the Real Touch, which I've posted about before. Regardless of what kind of films we're talking about, they're all becoming far more interactive. Now how about they bring back Smell-O-vision?