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HOME THEATRE MOTION SYSTEM
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D-BOX
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Turn your regular old comfy couch into a motion machine for movie watching.
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The D-BOX is a sophisticated piece of complex mechanical engineering, coupled with
high end movie encoding. In ten words or less, what you get is a frame on top of
which your couch sits. Electro-mechanical actuators lifts then pump up the four
corners of your couch in sync with the movie, giving you literally a moving movie
experience.
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The electro-mechanical actuators that do all the work are capable of vibrating as
slowly as 5 Hz, and can go up to 100 kHz. Because each motor is driven independently,
you can have your couch moved for you in three axes of movement. And the motors
are absolutely silent -- you never hear them, you do feel them!
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There's a lot more to it than simply plugging a few wires into your home theatre
system however. The D-BOX motion system comes with a controller -- an intelligent
brain that delivers the signals to the actuators, as to which position they need
to be in. The really clever bit is that each frame of the movie is encoded with
the actuator position.
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The movement of the couch is thus synchronized precisely with the movie. No matter
what you do, the couch always assumes the correct position!
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The tricky bit is that now each movie needs to be encoded with D-BOX Motion CodeTM
. Some movies have D-BOX Motion CodeTM embedded on the disc, which the controller
will pick up. The controller then plugs into the loop of the source signal to amplifier,
with a feed coming out of it, going to the D-BOX controllers.
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But if you have a regular DVD title, the chances are that it is not D-BOX encoded
on the disc. This is where the controller comes into its own. The controller is
clever enough to ID the movie being played, to load up the right D-BOX track and
send the signals down the wires to do their thing.
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Best of all, the controller is an intelligent one that can connect to the Internet
and download and store Motion Codes for hundreds of movies. So if there is a Motion
Code for your movie, the controller will download and store it permanently on its
hard drive, which can hold thousands of Motion Codes (the actual Motion Code data
is tiny, relative to the storage capacity of a DVD). You can even set your controller
to automatically update itself daily if you like, and so as more and more Motion
Code data is added to the already extensive database, you can add it to your own.
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So how does it perform?
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The first thing that hits you, literally, is how fast the thing can move. Each of
the 'lifters' has a throw of about 40 mm which doesn't sound like much until you
feel it hit the couch at the speed it does. They can literally throw the couch forwards,
backwards, sideways and then sometimes all three at the same time.
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It takes some getting used to, but once you're used to the experience, which should
take you about five minutes, you start to realize how much extra fun this system
adds to movie watching.
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Scenes of flying are probably the most impressive, with the couch seeming to loop
and pitch and sway in time with the movie (one of the reasons why the synchronization
with each frame is so important). Explosions and things that go bump in the night
are amazing -- and car chases are unlikely to ever be the same again. The rapid
reaction times of the lifters contribute to a dynamic movement range that is fast
enough to transmit a high frequency vibration -- which translates into super smooth
movement.
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