By David Ponce
If you turn down the volume and perk your ears up, I’m sure you’ll hear a faint wailing sound. That’s me, crying because I can’t afford to purchase the Mother of all home entertainment sofas. And you’ll be crying too when you find out what it does.
Company D-Box is selling these groovy sofas called “Quest X3ME” (pronounced “extreme”). Why groovy? Well, they integrate some heavy duty actuators to simulate motion. In other words, you could be watching a car chase, and get jerked around as if you were in the car yourself. The actuators are strong enough to produce up to 100 movements a second, and forces up to 2Gs. This is technology similar to that found in some amusement parks, except that now you can have it in your living room!
D-Box already went through hundreds of movies and produced “motion codes” for each. These are the sets of instructions that have to be loaded into the sofa in order for it to know just how and when to move. They are always producing new ones, which you can download and load into a “Series 3 340c Kinetron Controller with built-in 40GB hard drive”, the brains of the setup.
Of course, be ready to pay through the nose for all this.
US$5,299 for a single seat covered in NuSuede to US$10,299 for a loveseat with dual motorized reclining options covered in leather; US$1,000 for PC-based PC3 Motion Controller Interface and Windows software; US$3,200 for Series 3 340c Kinetron Controller with built-in 40GB hard drive; US$250 for F/X Motion Code Vol. 1, 2, 3, & 4
[D-Box] VIA [C|Net Asia]
