The Cheesiest Video Projector Ever

Without a doubt, it is a cheesy idea. On the other hand, at least it doesn't cost a lot of dough. Pizza Hut Hong Kong is selling pizza in a specially designed Blockbuster Box. Figuring that movies and pizzas go together like, well, mushrooms and pepperoni, the cardboard box can be rigged to project movies played on your phone. Yes—you read it right—a pizza box that projects movies.

The design and operation of the Blockbuster Box is as easy as pie. You flip out a pre-cut hole, fit a plastic lens in the hole, set your phone in the center pizza holder, and start movie playback. You also have to turn up the brightness of your phone's screen from Stun to Kill because it is only those feeble lumens that shine through the lens and onto any nearby wall.

Judging from the video, the projected images are about as clear as the bottom of the Mississippi River on a cloudy day. The brightness is probably barely adequate, assuming you are viewing the movie at the bottom of a coal mine during a solar eclipse. With a keen imagination, you might actually be able to discern what is happening onscreen. The dim flickering brings to mind the earliest of kinescopes, and I should also give a shout out to Plato's Cave Allegory. In any case, clearly, the box is a better marketing gimmick than movie projector.

Unfortunately, the Blockbuster Box is not very original; a quick YouTube search will reveal similar DIY phone projectors. Those don't offer the advantage of pizza accompaniment, but on the other hand, they won't turn your phone into a greasy mess. Hmm, audio quality might be a bit muffled inside the box; I guess you could connect via Bluetooth or an audio output cable.

One novel aspect is the QR code printed on the box; you scan it and download a free movie. There are four different movies with four different boxes cleverly titled: Fully Loaded (action), Slice Night (horror), Hot & Ready (romance) and Anchovy Armageddon (sci-fi). Clever.

The Pizza Hut projector is apparently part of a renaissance of our appreciation of cardboard. No longer confined to simple boxes and home construction in subdivisions down by the railroad tracks, cardboard is suddenly a high-tech building material. Check out Google Cardboard, for example. Clearly, this virtual reality viewer could have been made of plastic, but the fact that it's cardboard lends it a certain cool factor. Think of it as a kind of anti-technology technology.

Will Hong Kong Pizzatainment come to America? Who knows. At any rate, now that Pizza Hut has stepped up its box tech, brace yourself for imitators: Wood-fired woofers, rising-crust receivers, thin-crust turntables, deep-dish downloads—well, you get the idea.

Now, I know what you thinking: Pizza Hut—isn't that the company that makes pizzas that taste like cardboard? Or—hey, maybe the new and improved box tastes better than the pizza. Well, you can say anything you want. But in my opinion, those are the kind of comments that we just don't knead.

COMMENTS
brenro's picture

So it's not high quality audio/video. Still seems fun for a bunch of kids to have pizza delivered to the park and watch a movie projected onto a wall.

Rick17's picture

This looks really great actually. I can imagine how my nephew would like to get it, he's the biggest pizza fan I've ever seen in my life. I made a research for http://www.grabmyessay.com/research-papers about such handmade devices, I'm really excited to find another one. Kids usually don't demand a lot and happy with things like this video projector.

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