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Microsoft IllumiRoom creates a hugely immersive experience

Microsoft Research has released an impressive teaser video for IllumiRoom which uses the Kinect to employ your entire living room as a canvas to add and extended field of view to a gaming experience. I must admit even watching the video felt immersive and made me smile!

It appears to be more than just projecting the screen, they’re actually being creative by having lasers shoot out and explosions, buildings or snowflakes rendered in various artistic styles. Presumably there would be additional programming required within the game to support this, but we could expect to see another flurry of creativity in utilising this additional “screen” space. More details will come from the 2013 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

It goes way beyond the “ambient light” TVs which came out a few years ago by Phillips and Sony, and while we wait might prompt a resurgence of interest in DIY-maker ambience projects like this and this and cool products like this.

3 Comments

  1. I wonder if you could use the Phillips Hue “hackable” lightbulbs to achieve something similar:
    http://www.meethue.com/

    Reviewed in great detail at Ars Technica here
    http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/in-living-color-ars-reviews-the-hacker-approved-philips-hue-leds/

  2. This made me think about OLED wallpaper … wasn’t that meant to come out in some commercial form in the next year? Now that would be amazing ..

  3. Yes, things seem to have quiet on that front. Blame the GFC.

    “But yah, it vould be amazing…”

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