All of us watch movies. In general movies shown on a rectangular screen are 2-Dimensional movies (Length x Breadth). Some of us would have seen 3-D movies like "Chhota Chetan" or "Shiva ka insaaf", where the factor of "depth" also figures in and makes the viewer believe that he is inside the movie. But wait.....

We have started experimenting with 4-D vision too. The 4th dimension is the "ambience" where the audience is not only "in" the movie, but can also "feel" the movie. Let me explain this better as I experienced it in a small 4-D show at Shedd Aquarium, Chicago.

This was a short animation film, that we watched with those red/blue spectacles that are a must for the 3-D effect. We could smell the pickle used by one of the characters in his burger. We could also feel air gushing aroung our face from different directions, when we were supposedly flying at an altitude in the movie. We could also feel some creepy rats crawl over our feet at the lead character gets marooned in a jungle and is accosted by thousands of rats. Finally, a small log of wood pokes the lead character on his back, and lo, we were poked by a small knob attached onto our seats from our back.

I saw this at PVR Spice in NOIDA as well, although the show was not of that quality that I had seen across the Atlantic.

How do they do it: That's not easy as the entire set up of the movie theatre needs to be set up for that movie. the smell of pickle is priduced by an aerosol, let out in the air precisely when the movie shows it. The gush of air / water is managed by small hoses / sprinklier on the back of the seat ahead, again with precise timing. The creepy feeling of rodents crawling on one's feet is attained by using small hellical spring type of wires hidden carefully under each seat. The seat would shake when the aeroplane shakes, thus giving the viewer a feeling of being in the action.

Of course, all movies cannot go this route, but we could have this as one of the variants of cinema in the future. Just imagine yourself doing a spiderman from tower to tower in Manhattan.

This experience can not be explained in plain text;one needs to experience it to be able to appreciate. This is what "being in the movie" means. Lets see if this concept catches on and we have regular movies available in 4-D.