Of the 200 clients that I used to have during my maintenance days in the SF area, at least half of them were residential homes. If I had these Aqua-Theatre Entertainment Systems back then, I’m sure many of them would switch out their conventional aquariums for the new design in heart beat. Why? Because there is so much more that these special aquariums have to offer. Below are some ideas that jumps to my mind for home uses. Of course these ideas can also be used in a commercial setting as well.
- Play aquarium videos or coral reef videos while having real fish.
- Watch awesome 3d Blu-ray coral reef videos in 4D (3D in the background and 2D with the real fish). The imagery is amazing! (come in to my showroom for a free demo). Have a family night where everyone sees a new underwater nature video you just ordered from Amazon to play on the Aqua-Theatre Entertainment System. Like seeing a movie together, but playing it on your fish tank – something new and something cool!
- Play your own home videos or slideshows, like from your vacation in Hawaii or just a relaxing day at your local beach, park, or lighthouse!
- Play a slide show or video of your kid’s birthday party during family get togethers.
- If you are a scuba diver, play your own underwater footage from that trip to Fiji and have your real fish swim around.
- Watch a movie if you don’t mind the fish, kids will especially get a kick out of watching “Finding Nemo” or “Spongebob”.
- Stream media from the internet, like from Netflix or Youtube. There is one video of the Red Sea on Netflix that is pretty nice. Because the TVs act as monitors, you can hook up your computer to it. Sound funny to surf the web in a fish tank? Try it, you might be surprised.
- Create your own home videos or slideshows according to holidays and seasons for those family get togethers like Thanksgiving and Christmas. It will surely get everyone into the holiday spirit. Your relatives and friends will be pleasantly surprised.
- Run the Aqua-Theatre Entertainment System without fish! Yes, and it works. With all the HD and Blueray DVDs out there, especially the ones from The Ambient Collection, the video transforms your fish less tank into a “virtual aquarium”. Sometimes fish keeping gets too troublesome for many because of all the maintenance involved. This is one reason why people end up tearing down their tanks and ends up on Craigslist. The videos are designed to turn your regular TV into a fish tank to begin with, so playing it inside the Aqua-Theatre Entertainment System makes perfect sense. Let’s say you have absolutely no time to clean your aquarium or change water or to keep fish even, and you are too poor to hire somebody to take care of it. It is possible to run the whole thing even without water. In the beginning I did just that, just to see how it looked. Because the TVs are enclosed in a fish tank, and the video was designed to make your TV into a fish tank, well… you get the picture, not bad at all. Anyways, either with or without water, if you don’t keep fish, the unit can be used as a regular television.
- Be creative and have fun with the Aqua-Theatre Entertainment System. After all, it is just not another fish tank anymore, it is an interactive entertainment system. And I can tell you this, if you buy one of these setups, you will never get bored and probably keep it forever.
In the above video, I started out with a slideshow of sea turtles. Then I played it on the Aqua-Theatre Entertainment System blue back single TV. Took a video with lots of small fish swimming around, and just for fun, replayed the finished video on another system with less fish (below).
The real fish in the video are a panther grouper, 2 bangaii cardinals, 2 blue hippo tangs, 1 blackfin damsel, 1 blue damsel, and 1 Fancy Snow ocellaris (the other one in the background video that looks similar, is a Snow Onyx ocellaris). Even with a smaller tank with fewer fish, the aquarium looks very busy with lots of activity. Now I can switch around and play this video on the dual TV system and would look awesome, or play it back on the original aquarium that the video was taken. Just another neat idea to play around with the Aqua-Theatre Entertainment System.
One cool idea is to keep your favorite fish in memory with a video. I’m sure we all have sought after a certain rare fish just to die in the end. But if you had made videos of the sucker in happy times, well you can replay anytime and it would look like you still have him in the tank!