TALKING TECH

A vintage month boasts £20k watches and the Batmobile… And one REALLY cool thing

This month, our columnist Duncan Bell gets a ride in the Batmobile, and gets a little bit moist over a movie projector

You can get a bit blasé doing this job, and Lord knows I do. Invites to Parliament? Meh. Looking at next-level, hush-hush start-ups? Whatevs. Driving the Batmobile? Oh, if I must.

So I did do that, this month. I was also chauffeured from the grimy streets of Munich to Switzerland’s Jura Valley, a place so chocolate-box perfect, I half-expected the Von Trapps to hove into view at any moment, singing about being chased by Goebbels (or whatever The Sound Of Music is about).

The 360-degree VR miracle that is the HTC Vive arrived at my flat this month, too – nightmare. And Dyson sent me a new vacuum cleaner and, if you please, a hairdryer. So it’s basically like Dyson is openly mocking me at this stage.

I did, however, get one thing in the post that gave a genuinely massive increase to my general happiness.

Ner-ner-ner-ner-ner-ner

But just to backtrack slightly… driving the Batmobile. Yes, the real one, from the current Bat movie.

This is the sort of thing that sounds impossibly cool but isn’t quite so much fun in reality. For a start, the ride took place in Bicester. Now, just as an exercise, try to imagine a place as different to Gotham City as it’s possible to conceive. Well, that’s Bicester.

And obviously, I wasn’t actually allowed to drive it. That’s partly because it’s worth millions, and partly because – and I’m sorry to shatter any illusions here – it’s not a real car; it’s a prop. It goes, but only barely.

So I was, in fact, chauffeured around in the Batmobile by my very own Alfred the butler, who was really a grumpy man in a black bomber jacket.

The experience is a little hard to describe, but imagine the worst aspects of going incredibly fast in a car, except doing so at about 20mph.

Even at that low speed, it felt like death might lie around the next corner. Any corner, no matter how simple. The Batmobile steers like a cow.

And yet, my god, the noise. The noise! From the moment the ignition button was pressed, the Batmobile made a sound like steel girders being torn in two by, I don’t know, Superman or something. So basically, driving the Batmobile was like driving an invalid carriage through a war.

My other drive, on the same track that day, was much more interesting. Here, an Irish guy with a limp whirled me around in a Jeep – Bruce Wayne drives a Jeep, you see. It was interesting because as soon as he got in, he started regaling me about how he used to drive F1 cars… until a horror crash led to him being pronounced dead three times (it’s OK, he got better).

When I got back to the office, we looked him up. Although we couldn’t find video of the actual crash, there was some horribly eloquent footage of the aftermath: a trail of crushed metal stretching for about 30 yards. Then, as the camera continued to pan around, it eventually lit upon a crumpled rag-doll figure that had been flung about a further 30 yards. That was my driver.

But, as the late, great Ronnie Corbett used to say, I digress. By far the best thing I saw this month – and far more emotionally transporting than the Batmobile – was an Epson HD projector worth £1,200 – a cheap-ish projector with a large-ish screen (‘only’ 80 inches).

But it turns out that once you get to that size, something magical happens: movies become genuinely cinematic.

That’s why my discovery of the joy of projectors is my tech highlight of the year. Having once watched movies avidly, I’d become awfully jaded with them. But this heap of cream plastic with a lens on the front has managed nothing less than to rekindle my love of film-watching. All the flicks I’ve seen before have a new, larger life, and it’s made me hungry for the latest releases in a way I’ve not felt for years. It’s cost me a fortune, actually – DVDs look a bit crap on it, so I’ve been having to upgrade much of my collection to Blu-ray as I go along.

I don’t think the effect is simply down to size; it’s something intangible, born from the experience of having images beamed over your shoulder in a stream of flickering light. Case in point: I subsequently tried an £8,000 beamer from Sony. Of course it was better, but taking the big step back to the Epson really wasn’t that big a wrench.

It’s that kind of magic – not novelty, nor expense, nor peer-impressing specs – that can make tech great. It takes activities you enjoy, or once enjoyed, and helps you love them like the first time.

This heap of plastic with a lens on the front has rekindled my love of film-watching