Theatre chains love IMAX screens and 3D. As regular ticket sales slowly decline, profits on screenings making use of these two technologies are on the rise, representing the industry’s biggest growth. To continue that trend, theatre chains and movie studios have partnered with Montreal-based D-Box, a company that produces special motion-activated chairs that can deliver force feedback sensations synchronized to the action taking place on the screen.

 

The chairs are embedded with actuators and electromechanics that can lift and move it with piston-like action while triggering variable vibrations to simulate a wide range of sensations, from simple actions like a car going over a rough road to gun shots to gas tankers sliding across a frozen lake and tumbling off a cliff.

For the past decade the company has produced the chairs as a high-end luxury item for home theatre buffs willing to spend thousands of dollars to have them installed in their homes and used for all the latest DVD releases. The success of that market is what brought the company to the attention of studio bosses.

After some successful pilot programs in the United States, the Queensview Cineplex in Etobicoke, Ontario has been chosen to be the first Canadian theatre to install the new chairs and for an extra $7 movie goers can choose to add motion to their experience beginning with the launch of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when it opens this coming July 15th.

At first glance the chairs look like any other in a theatre, standing out simply because of their royal red colour. Only the second-last row of seats at the Queensview theatre is made up of D-Box chairs and each is armed with an intensity control, allowing users to tap a + or – button to either increase or decrease the amount of motion. This includes the option to turn the motion completely off, should it prove to be too distracting for some.

To prevent people from simply buying a standard ticket and then switching seats during the screening, the row of D-box chairs will be sold with assigned seating. Users pick out their chair from a seating chart and only the chairs that have been purchased are activated.

I’ve tested D-Box chairs for the home before, but this week I asked movie reviewer Richard Crouse to join me for a preview screening of the D-Box experience to see how the technology relates to Cineplex conditions. We were shown a highlight reel from the movie Fast & Furious containing action, drama, and romance scenes to deliver the full range.

Just as Foley artists watch the movies and use household objects to recreate the sound effects of on-screen actions, so too do D-Box programmers get access to a movie before release, noting every major action on the screen and experimenting with the different frequencies of vibration and lifts the chair can produce to create sequences that match the expectation of that movement.

As the cars in the film raced across dirt roads, you could feel the rough and tumble of the uneven surface beneath, from the bottom of the chair. The exact texture of that effect changed as the camera switched perfective between the different cars as each car handled the road differently.

When Michelle Rodriguez’s character dropped the trailer hitches from the tankers, the chairs matched the loud impact with a shock that struck the base of the chair and radiated off to the sides.

 

Gun shots produced a round impact at the very middle of the chair’s back that vibrated outwards to give you the feeling of something have just passed right through you.

When the chase sequence reached its climax and the tankers tumbled on their side, sliding across the road to the cliff, the chairs throttled about, simulating the tumble, before elevating themselves to deliver a sense of weightlessness as the wreckage spilled over the edge and into a fall.

The effect isn’t one used for every scene in the film. While two characters sit and talk in their apartment, the chairs remains motionless, but it’s not simply limited to action sequences either. When the characters entered a nightclub, as bikini-clad girls passed by the camera the D-Box chairs produced a pulsating beat at the very base of the spine to match the bass of the music being played within the night club.

Is it worth spending the extra seven dollars? As you might expect it depends on the movie. The fun factor is certainly there and the technology itself is sophisticated enough that you can’t simply dismiss it. This isn’t something as crude as a chair that merely vibrates whenever the soundtrack gets loud.

While you wouldn’t want to use it for a screening of Slumdog Millionaire, it’s quite appropriate for the major summer blockbusters like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Terminator Salvation, or X-men Origins: Wolverine where audience expectations are geared more towards outlandish effects and adrenaline experiences over story and character development.

Movie critic Richard Crouse says he’ll give the chairs a pass on his screenings where I personally may fork over the cash for five or six select blockbusters in a given year.

I expect D-Box Motion Code will follow IMAX’s 3D technology in dividing some audiences. Some will find it distracting and inappropriate while others, especially younger audiences will see it as more than just a gimmick and like the idea of having another aspect of their experience to discuss and compare notes on after.

Depending on how well the Harry Potter screenings at Etobicoke are received, Cineplex Odeon will expand their D-Box offerings into other theatres across the country. They have set up a pair of demo chairs in the Cineplex’s lobby so that movie goers attending other screenings can test the technology out (although at a lower setting) and deliver feedback.

In the United States the first set of installations in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Austin, Texas have been successful enough to warrant another expansion into other US states and to even expand the number of chairs in those pilot theatres.

As I muse the prospects of motion movie-going, it’s interesting to note that the Cineplex or Multiplex itself is a Canadian invention, first introduced in Ottawa in 1935, that IMAX, whose massive screens and 3D technology are currently dominating theatre chains, is also Canadian, and now we have with D-Box another Canadian innovation set to change the way we watch movies.