If you’ve ever been to an amusement park, or theme park I’m sure you’ve ridden a movie based ride before. The ones where you walk in, and it’s shaped like a movie theater, but the seats will move along with the motions of what’s happening on screen. Imagine something close to that, but having it the luxury of your home theater setup. Plus, it works with movies you already own.

D-Box is the company developing the hardware for this experience. They’ve created an entire line of Home Theater products, catering to different consumers. They have a gaming line as well, that focuses mainly on driving games.

The GPH-120 is the top of the line gaming chair that D-Box manufactures. It cost $2,999, but with a steep price tag it provides a visceral experience like no other. It acts as a hybrid chair, so you can use this for movie viewing as well. It has two motion actuators that pitch, roll, and heave along with what’s happening in-game. The chair comes with a built-in steering wheel, and foot pedals as well.

D-Box has a licensing agreement with Disney, Universal Studios, Sony Pictures, Fox Home Entertainment, Lionsgate, and Blue Underground. So, most of the high profile Hollywood movies will be immediately compatible with D-Box’s products.

If you want to check out more on how it works, you can view a ‘How-To’ video, here.

Here’s a video provided by WebProNews. It’s D-Box’s demonstration at CES 2009, and shows off some more of their products.

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When I worked at Best Buy, we had a small kiosk for Apple branded products. It always stood out, because Apple styled things differently than anything else in our store. Also, the kiosk had a specially trained Apple representative. They were never really part of the team, but from what I remember did a decent enough job.

Apple has done quite a bit to expand their retail presence, by showing up in more stores, while opening up more stores on their own. Microsoft looks to start following this trend as they’ve announced plans to show up in more retail stores.

I’m left questioning as to how opening a chain of retail stores could benefit Microsoft? It make sense for Apple because nearly everything the provide is proprietary. Meaning that when you shop with Apple, everything that you need to get started is done through Apple. From hardware, down to software.

Microsoft has a different way of monetizing their business. They generally sell their OS for use in other vendors. There’s very few products that Microsoft can actually ’sell’ in a retail store. Granted, they have expanded with their Zune, and the gaming console, Xbox 360.

I think that Microsoft could find success by opening up a vendor system in already open retail stores. Much like the Apple kiosk I mentioned before. Since Microsoft relies on so many products used on other systems, just having a presence to provide customers with information would be a viable option. Plus, it would be funny to see an Apple rep, and Microsoft rep duke it out in the middle of a Best Buy.

[via: Cnet]

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Microsoft has tried nearly every tactic in the book when it comes to advertising. They started out with comedy, and ended up just scaring people. They then moved to striking back against Apple, with their ‘I’m A PC’ campaign. Which was definitely better than the Seinfled/Gates comedy duo but still really didn’t drive any significant point across to the public. Things really got interesting when they brought in Eva Longoria. Alas, she had but one miniscule role in that commercial.

I think Microsoft has finally found something that works, in terms of advertising. Using adorable children to show off how easy Windows functions are to navigate. I think the strategy here is definitely the best Microsoft has implemented yet. You can’t help but smile when you watch Kylie make her picture of Dorothy better and send it to her family. Plus, the commercial actually shows a product in action and isn’t random people claiming that they’re PC’s or showing Bill Gates buy a pair of shoes at the mall.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=533e05d2-9f12-4a86-bdda-efd0455fcd36" target="_new" title="Kylie">Video: Kylie</a>

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Bill Gates has officially gone off the deep end. The question remains, were there actually mosquitoes in there or not? Either way, it’s still a pretty sick joke to bring up malaria and then release mosquitoes on the audience. And then make a joke about not only poor people should get the disease.

Bizarre indeed.

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