Amy's Robot

In case movies aren't overloading your senses enough

Sony has submitted a patent for a new device that would enhance the movie-watching experience by shooting ultrasound waves at your head while you sit in the theater, to create "sensory experiences" that correspond to action in the movie. These brain-manipulations could involve taste or smell, or make you think someone is touching you. (Heh. That's hot. Or scary. Depending.) Presumably, it could also make blind or deaf people experience movies in ways that they couldn't otherwise.

The Daily News chronicles some earlier attempts to manipulate the senses of movie watchers, all of which have awesome names, and all of which ultimately failed to catch on. The most famous is Smell-O-Vision, from 1960's Scent of Mystery. But many lesser-known interactive ideas were pioneered by "King of Ballyhoo" William Castle, a gimmicky thriller director from the 1950's and 60's who wanted his audiences to get that little extra boost, or electric shock, to enhance their viewing. The Daily News piece says, "Percepto, an invention used by exhibition hustler extraordinaire William Castle on his 1959 horror film The Tingler, was a less expensive failure. When characters let out screams in the movie, some viewers did, too, thanks to electrical buzzers that zapped them in their seats." The next year, Castle tried Illusion-O for the movie 13 Ghosts, in which viewers wore 3-D-like glasses that allowed them to see ghosts that were otherwise invisible. Castle used the Emergo 3-D technique in House on Haunted Hill with Vincent Price. During screenings of this movie, the theater pulled an big inflatable glow-in-the-dark skeleton over audiences to scare them.

Another later invention, not by William Castle, called Sensurround used 1,600-watt bass speakers placed around the theater, which shook the floors and walls of the theater during action scenes in movies. "While testing Sensurround before its 1974 debut with Earthquake, plaster was jarred loose from the ceiling of Hollywood's famous Grauman's Chinese Theater."

No mention is made in the article of the delightful John Waters scratch-n-sniff innovation, Odorama, from 1981's Polyester. Like its predecessors, it existed for only one movie.

categories: Movies, Technology
posted by amy at 10:45 AM | #