Walter Mossberg, from the Wall Street Journal, has found a new $150 gadget to enhance video gaming and music listening. The ButtKicker Gamer is a device that you attach to the bottom of your chair and emits sound waves from your favorite games or music. These sound waves send vibrations through your body, starting from the bottom up. Mossberg gives us his impressions in this article (paid registration needed). He tells us that male testers enjoyed more the gadget than female ones. He also says that it is more an enhancement to videogames than to music.
Here is the story of the device.
The ButtKicker started as an onstage device to help musicians, especially drummers and bass players, follow the bass line at rock concerts. An expensive and very powerful home-theater version already is being sold in some Best Buy and specialty outlet stores for installation in couches, chairs and even floors.
On August 1, Guitammer will release a more mainstream version of its product: the ButtKicker Gamer. The Gamer is considerably smaller and lighter than the home-theater version and will be sold in a $149.95 package that includes its separate amplifier. Last week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I got an exclusive opportunity to try it out. We tested the ButtKicker Gamer with some input from friends and visitors around the office.
The ButtKicker has a clamp on one end and a bulging electronic piece on the other. The clamp portion resembles an extra-large wrench -- a nine-inch straight piece with a tightening clasp at one end. This piece wouldn't open far enough to screw onto the thick center posts of our office chairs, so Guitammer shipped a chair to us that had a thinner post and we used that. The company insists most office chairs and desk chairs people use with PCs at home have the thinner type of post.
Here is what the ButtKicker Gamer looks like.
Here are Mossberg's conclusions.
We did discover a gender gap in the reactions to the ButtKicker: Most of our male testers, regardless of age, were considerably more enthusiastic about it than most of our female testers. The women, including Katie, saw it more as a novelty, useful for videogames, but not something they'd buy or use daily with music. The men just thought it was cool and imagined using it all the time.
Katie and I both agreed that the ButtKicker was more of an enhancement to videogames than to music. But, while I liked it overall, she viewed it as primarily "a guy thing."
If you happen to be these days at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, please stop at booth #6347 to try the ButtKicker Gamer by yourself. You'll find some other details in The Buttkicker Is Coming to E3.
You can also visit the Buttkicker website for more information.
Source: Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2004; and various websites
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