Tron: Ares 3D D-BOX Review | PEBKAC: Presence Exceeded Because Keyboard and Chair

v1.0.4 | 13 Minute Read

• The Grid
• The Ride
• The Future of Music
• The 4D Guy Motion Rating
• The Settings
• The Bonus Features

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🖥️ The Grid

Ares was right: PEBKAC — Presence Exceeded Because Keyboard and Chair¹

The magicians at D-BOX have created an unforgettable experience with their orchestration of Tron: Ares paired with 3D and the NIN soundtrack. Much like Nine Inch Nails‘ The Perfect Drug², I’m craving my next fix.

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It’s now the day after my experience and my mind is racing. My heart is pounding. I’m currently making my way down I-15 through the Virgin River Canyon in Arizona, in the pitch black of night, headed toward Las Vegas, and all I see are RED and WHITE strips of light. All other colors fading away. The soundtrack playing; I feel like I am in the system. Am I?

Sorry, Fed-Ex truck, you don’t belong here. Your colors…are off.

DELETE

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🌀 The Ride

My mind keeps re-running through my experience; roughly a two-hour explosion of speed, light, and sound that comes together in an almost perfect package.

The opening sequence pulled me right in and didn’t let me go except for a few rare scenes amounting to a majority of the movie having some sort of motion aspect. This was not a dialog heavy movie and when there was dialog, it tended to cut back and forth between the dialog and action pretty consistently, avoiding any long lulls in motion.

To be honest, this giant paragraph is the last part of the review I am writing. I became so focused on the next section, the thing that got me most excited about this experience, that I’m struggling to work my way through listing out the individual positive D-BOX moments in this movie. It might be partially due to the fact that it’s almost 2AM on the Friday after I experienced the movie on Tuesday, and I have to get this out there before you can’t even see the movie in D-BOX. It could also be because I’ve been quickly trying to create the 4DGuy.com site, its needed social accounts, all while mostly doing it after my family has fallen asleep while on our fall break vacation. And that might be more than you probably care to know. But know this, my assumptions about what this movie experience would be like caused me to finally put nail to wood and create 4DGuy. My assumptions were right. I’ve been an avid fan of D-BOX for over the last 15 years, and whenever I talk to strangers about their movie experiences, almost no one tells me about D-BOX. If they do, they don’t share my same excitement for it and to that I say “they’re doing it wrong”. I try to share it with everyone I know. This movie has made me even more excited for the future of D-BOX and motion experiences than any other D-BOX movie I’ve seen.

While this first review won’t include a play by play of the motion scenes, and I’m guessing my future ones won’t either (I hate spoilers), I’ll vaguely share one scene where I had a perma-grin that I couldn’t get off of my face for quite some time; getting knocked around in my chair by what I’m calling a sled-dozer. Now that had some major punch to it and instantly took me back to my first D-BOX movie experience, Inception, when I nearly got thrown out of my chair when the train comes out of nowhere. I confirmed this with my son when they re-released it for the 10 year anniversary of Inception in D-BOX and he finally got to experience it in D-BOX. I knew the train was coming, so I was watching my son waiting to see his reaction, and even though I knew it was on the way, I was still caught off guard by that train and it still almost threw me out of my chair. We both instantly busted up laughing; apparently, that’s our natural response when we get the crap scared out of us.

There are a number of positive D-BOX moments in Tron: Ares that you need to experience. I’m struggling to find the balance on how to share them without spoiling the surprise. As I delve into future reviews, hopefully I can find that balance. On the flip side of the positive, like any system, I uncovered a few glitches. In this case, they tend to be more in the form of omissions rather than done wrongs.

I’m a visceral guy; a 4D guy, if you will. I wanted to feel the rain. I don’t remember feeling the rain. I wanted to experience what they were experiencing on screen in that moment. I’ll have to check this on my re-watch. I am hoping I was just too focused on my milkshake at the time to notice. I’ll update this later on my findings.

Racing movies are a given for me having to go see when it comes to D-BOX. Some reach near perfection while others stall out. In Tron: Ares, it pains me to say that some of the vehicle scenes could’ve used more energy. While I understand that there wasn’t as much of the first person aspect in Tron: Ares in regard to the vehicles, there are ways to do it properly. Other D-BOX movies have done this better; Fast and Furious 4–67, Need for Speed, Gran Turismo, Mission Impossible 6–8, and F1 come to mind. As much as I can remember, they all did it better than Tron: Ares.

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🎵 The Future of Music

Sinners was the first to do it, or at least the first time I experienced it; D-BOX vibrations and pulses to the music, the gosh dang music during the end credits! I was blown away! We all get the experience from a good subwoofer, shaking us to the beat, but D-BOX to one of the end credit songs in Sinners was otherworldly. It wasn’t just to the bass, it was with the music. I was salivating. I wanted more. Then I heard that Tron: Ares’ soundtrack was to be created by none other than NIN; Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. When Trent Reznor graduated from high school the year I was born, he began pursuing a major in computer engineering at Allegheny College. After a year of college, he dropped out to pursue a career in music and thank the computer gods for erasing his digital presence. Turns out, the system wasn’t for him. I on the other hand completed my major in computer science, always dreaming of making my own music (and yet to do so), but I digress.

The reason for my excitement upon hearing about NIN and the Tron collaboration: what would D-BOX do with the music? Would they take the Sinners experience and continue on that trajectory? Well folks, D-BOX stepped up their game in this regard. In the opening sequence, you get to feel the music through the D-BOX chair ever so slightly combined with other motion effects during what I’m calling the Creation scene. They then continue to enhance the music through the movie, though sparingly noticed. Finally, you get to the end credits where the visuals disappear and all you have is that scrolling text³ and the music, but this time I noticed something different⁴, I noticed that there were vibrations to what you would expect in the song, but I swear there were vibrations not to any notes, but in-between the notes, that enhanced the music in a way I have never experienced. And then they cut me off. How dare they!

Don’t get me wrong, I loved almost every minute of the entire Tron: Ares experience, but please D-BOX gods, whatever you do, don’t pull back the curtain to show me a 30 second teaser of what I imagine the future of music to be, and then close the curtain just as I’m about to walk through. And I have to laugh because as I mentioned before this curtain was pulled back not during the movie itself but rather during the end credits as the text (love the underscores) starts scrolling.

I’m now seeing the future of music that I hope comes to exist in my lifetime:

I’m at a NIN concert, haptic suit donned, and as the lights and sound start to play, I begin to feel the music and feel between the music, physical notes, telling me a story through the use of more of my senses than ever before. After the concert, you’ll see me the next day doing yard work, wearing my haptic suit, “listening” to the same album with a perma-grin plastered on my face. And that weekend, after all my work is done for the day, my family and I will put on our AR/MR/VR headsets and haptic suits and I’ll take them to the concert, sharing with them an experience unlike any other.

While I await this future, I’ll hope for any or all of the following:

1. A theater release of Tron: Legacy in 3D D-BOX.
2. A Composer’s Cut of both Tron: Legacy and Tron: Ares where the only audio is the soundtrack, preferably in 3D D-BOX, reminiscent of the Black and Chrome Cut of Mad Max: Fury Road.
3. A 3D D-BOX upgrade of Tron: Ares with the D-BOX experience through all of the end credits and its accompanying music along with my other suggested improvements, please and thank you!

And I mean it; a BIG thank you to everyone who helped bring Tron: Ares, in D-BOX and 3D to the THEATER! I love my home entertainment system, but it’s experiences like this that keep pulling me back to the theater.

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🎯 The 4D Guy Motion Rating⁵

6½ out of 7

A killer theme park ride with enormous amounts of brilliance. Merging motion, music, and visual depth, Tron Ares in 3D D-BOX nearly hits transcendence but holds back just enough to leave me craving that aforementioned upgrade.

If you saw Tron Ares in a stationary chair and the experience synced with you at all, you owe it to yourself to hop on your light cycle and go see it in D-BOX⁶ before it’s deleted from theaters⁷.

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⚙️ The Settings

• I always sit with both arms on the armrests and my head back, otherwise, I flop around like a ragdoll instead of moving as one with the chair. It’s the way D-BOX was meant to be experienced and trust me, it changes everything. I believe not sitting properly is the most common reason people say they didn’t like the D-BOX experience. Who would like being shaken around like the cat in the box from Christmas Vacation?
• My D-BOX seat was set to the highest intensity. If you change your setting during the trailers, keep in mind that the system usually resets the D-BOX chair back to the middle setting right before the movie starts. You can usually tell when it does this because the chair will give a small shake when it does. The chair settings are low, medium, and high…or off. But I really don’t want to mention that you can turn it off. At least go through the movie on low if medium and high are too intense for you. You paid for D-BOX; you might as well experience it!
• I enjoyed the experience at the Larry H. Miller Megaplex Theatres at Valley Fair Mall in West Valley, UT, Theater 4, Seat G8 at 9:10PM on Tuesday, October 14th, 2025. I experienced no issues with the seat. There were a total of eight of us, family and friends, that went to this viewing. If your chair isn’t working or has issues (creaky chair anyone?), if you purchased through the app, you can swap your seat and it will activate D-BOX on the new seat.

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📽️ The Bonus Features

1. PEBKAC actually means Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair, referring to the User. I swear I was the only one that caught that line (it was fast and honestly, I missed the words before it). Where were my Computer GEEKs at? ID10Ts! GEEK is just an acronym for Greatly Enhanced Efficiency and Knowledge in the area of the word that comes before it. Good examples would be Car GEEK, Food Geek, and AYSO Soccer GEEK, though I’ll only partially claim one of those titles.
2. Lost Highway, The Perfect Drug — Album artwork and title look like a prediction of NIN being destined to create a Tron soundtrack. The lyrics are perfect for a sequel to Tron: Ares… or at least they’ve got me thinking. Maybe a little too much cart before the horse thinking.
   
3. A big thank you to all of those that deserve credit for creating this experience and a big thank you to my dad for teaching me to stay through the credits before post-credit and mid-credit scenes existed to pay respect to those who created the experience.
4. They may have done this during the movie and I just didn’t notice it (I’ll check in my re-watch), or maybe they just couldn’t do it because of the motion predicated by the visuals. I’m not sure, but I do know that during the end credits, when there was no imagery competing for motion, I swear I could feel what I’m calling physical notes that didn’t match or line up with any part of the song notes…amazing!
5. Yes, I’m trying to help others in making that whole rating out of seven a real thing. It’s always made sense to me with the four-star rating being average with three stars on either side of it balancing out from average to lesser or greater in equal numbers the way a five-star rating scale would, but with two more rating options. Rating by ten does not give you the middle ground rating option. I may choose to update the description for each number rating in the future, if it becomes necessary.
   ★☆☆☆☆☆☆ – avert your eyes!
   ★★☆☆☆☆☆ – really not good
   ★★★☆☆☆☆ – not good
   ★★★★☆☆☆ – average
   ★★★★★☆☆ – good
   ★★★★★★☆ – great
   ★★★★★★★ – truly excellent
   https://davedelong.com/blog/2017/11/09/my-rating-system/
    https://developertravels.com/the-out-of-7-rating-system/
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
6. Finding it in D-BOX and 3D will be a feat. In Utah, the only Megaplex Theatre that had it was in West Valley, a roughly one hour drive from my home. If you can’t find it in 3D and D-BOX, then D-BOX by itself is a worthy reason for a rewatch. I keep coming back to this specific theater for any 3D D-BOX experience. It’s like a two-hour theme park ride without the crazy line. Shoutout to How to Train Your Dragon (Live Action) in 3D D-BOX for being another incredible experience that literally brought tears to my eyes; of joy, exhilaration, and heart. Who would have thought that letting the original director come back for the live action version would be a good idea?
7. In Utah, both Megaplex Theatres and Cinemark Theatres have D-BOX showings of movies, but it’s only in a subset of theater screens and only a subset of seats in those limited theaters. They might only keep the movies in D-BOX for a week, letting a new major release take the subset of theater screens with D-BOX. The theater I saw it in, Megaplex at Valley Fair, has it in 3D D-BOX and 2D D-BOX through at least Thursday, October 23rd.

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📜 The Version History

v1.0.3

• Added the actual meaning for PEBKAC to the footnotes.

v1.0.3

• Added to the footnotes info about the chair resetting the intensity right before the movie starts as well as the ability to swap seats, at least at the Megaplex Theatres, if the chair is having issues.
• Changed The Music and The Future to The Future of Music.
• Added requests for additional Tron releases in the The Future of Music section.
• Changed Megaplex and Cinemark Theaters to Theatres.
• Changed all references from a Score to a Rating system.
• Expanded on and clarify the rating out of seven instead of five or ten.
• Added location details on where I was when it was pitch black, in the Arizona Virgin River Canyon area.
• Added more links to D-BOX technologies, the Tron: Ares trailer and the Megaplex and Cinemark websites.
• Added the estimated read time of 13 minutes.
• Added specific date and showing time when I saw the movie, because I like including too much detail.
• Changed Thursday to Friday in my reference to when I wrote the last section. Apparently, once you hit midnight, it becomes the next day. 🤪
• Fixed some typos.

v1.0.2

• Changed The Motion Score to The 4D Guy Motion Score.
• Updated external links to open in new tabs.
• Added a Spotify embed of The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails.
• Added a Spotify embed of the Tron: Ares by Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.

v1.0.1

• I’ve decided to allow ½-star scoring, which bumps this review from a 6 to a 6½ out of 7. If the improvements I mentioned get made, it could easily reach a full 7. Maybe it’s a little messed up to let my first review flirt with perfection, but it also feels right. This was the movie that finally pushed me to launch this site and write my first review. It was that good.
• Fixed some previous edits that were lost in my initial drafts.
• Added the version history section.