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Microsoft Patent Details Whole-Room Projection Game Environment
Mackadoodledoo writes "Details of an immersive video games display system that projects images of the title's environment around a player's room have been revealed in a U.S. patent belonging to Microsoft."
here we come.
so.. A holodeck?
So, a personal game graphics cave circa 1990? That sure is MS innovation for you.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
how good will a flight sime be now... o wait
I don't think this will work in my living room. It's not really just a big empty white box.
I skimmed the patent and saw nothing new. Sigh :(
I'm a MS in CS student and I know the basics of how to do everything they claim. I just don't have the time or resources to do it all myself (was actually working on a project doing smaller subset of their features - turning off projection where the user is standing. Will I get sued for that now?). I also never even considered patenting it or anything else I produce :/
So it is a crappy version of CAVE except with a TV display in it to show better quality images?
What like the ones currently being used by the military?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
But mom, I can't make my bed until I kill the zombies guarding it! And I can't possibly clean up my room until they stop bleeding on the carpet.
You know those fake flash games that pretend to be a maze or something and then a gigantic scary face pops out and screams and freaks you out? Hehehehehehehe.
Whole room projection has been in scifi forever and a whole bunch of researchers have done it before some with moving floors.
Where this MS patent is different and where it becomes patentable is "main display" and "secondary display" and merging the two.
It envisions your TV as your main display, with some sort of secondary projector to do the rest of the room and the secondary projection will merge with what is on the TV.
Flight simulators have used multiple merged screens for years. But the MS idea of primary and secondary is slightly different.
I've done this with a good projector, two cheapie projectors, and some old laptops for Doom of all things. Who do I talk to to invaldate the patent? There are pictures but there is no video.
Fahrenheit 451, Star Trek, Gamer? Any other TV show or movie that has had a Holodeck of sorts? Come on, how do you patent something like that?
A professor of mine was doing this back in 2004, I wonder if that counts as prior art, or he could have been working with microsoft I guess.
The furniture better not have rounded corners!
http://saveie6.com/
They could tie every tech company in court for eons.
Prior art http://www.mechdyne.com/cave.aspx
What was that...1979? Chris Claremont/John Byrne? Colossus throwing Wolverine like a ball? Screw you, Microsoft. Y'ain't got nothing on this one.
---- Please be nice in case my Slashdot karma ~= my real life karma.
This is a rather neat idea. It is intended to present the effect of a CAVE system, but without a dedicated room. The new ideas here involve using something like a Kinect to profile the room in terms of both geometry and color, then adjust the projected images to compensate. The room wall display comes from a projector atop the main monitor, a projector with optics set up to display a 360 degree image. (Aim a projector at a shiny sphere, and you get half a sphere of projection. Two such rigs facing each other will cover a whole sphere, except for the area behind the projectors. Or you can use fisheye lenses on projectors.)
All this stuff has to be aligned. When you have a wide-angle Kinect-like device, control all the projectors, and have modern CPU and GPU power, alignment will be a few seconds of flashing patterns as the room model is built. Thereafter, as long as you don't move too far from your initial position in the room, the geometry should be good.
The wall projections will probably be somewhat low-rez for now, but that will improve as projectors improve. Even with a low-rez environment, you'll have much better situational awareness in games. (In other words, you can see when somebody is about to attack you from behind.) Any game with group melee combat can benefit from this. Impressive.
Isn't having thought about it supposed to be enough prior art?
Another Microsoft post, another Microsoft shill...
This was already done by UIUC -- they have "caves" in the Beckman Institute that already do this, and I believe they even played Quake II in there.
Beckman Institute Cave link: http://isl.beckman.illinois.edu/Labs/CAVE/CAVE.html
Quake II in cave: http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/caveQuake/
Why am I not surprised with a UID like "KinkyKing" you are posting "more baby more"?
As for TFA, who in the hell is gonna have a room so perfectly uncluttered and whose walls are all bare enough to make this worth using? I think a more workable idea was that one I saw awhile back where they had the VR helmet and a little treadmill like thing that allowed 360 degree movement. At least with that the player could stand in one little spot and not have to worry about having perfectly clear walls to project their games onto.
Frankly though with all the patents that all the big corps are getting nowadays it seems to me more like they are just throwing shit at a wall and hoping that something sticks. Since patents last for 20 years and the USPTO lets you be vague as hell when it comes to them I wouldn't be surprised if anything involving games and projection for the next 20 odd years will be getting a phone call from a MSFT lawyer with their hand out. We really need a "use it or lose it" clause where if you don't actually use the patent to make some product, at a reasonable price and offered at a reasonable number of locations to keep them from just making a one off and asking a million bucks for it, then you lose the patent, simple as that. That would help get rid of all the patent trolling and might even keep companies from spamming the USPTO by making them think about having to actually make a product of some kind out of what they are filing for.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cinechamber
The real innovation is using the kinect to automatically track and align the secondary projected image, so you can just set up the projector and go - without spending hours fiddling, aligning, tweaking keystone, etc, etc.
You bribe the patent clerks, or otherwise use your money to bribe ... cough ... legislate the process in your favor.
I think you saw that in a dream.
Think about making a 'treadmill' that allows 360 degree movement. You are ether standing inside a ball or on top of one.
That said, I own an old VR helmet. You're going to want to sit and have solidly mounted controls in your hands. Less pukey that way.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is a patent APPLICATION, not a PATENT. The USPTO PAIR website, so far, has no examiner-side documents. As this was filed just 18 months ago, and things at the USTO can take around 30 months for a final decision, there will be plenty of time to examine prior art. I'm not convinced CAVE totally preempts this patent, either. CAVE is a room with perfectly flat walls and no furniture. The MS spec and claims describe the ability for the system to perceive depth and obstructions and distort the projection so that the user sees 'nothing' except the game environment, including in rooms with furniture and not just flat square walls.
http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/c6.php
Aren't VR glasses better? The room in the article looks larger than my entire flat - not to mention it's full of stuff, not empty walls.
While this is cool for dedicated locations, and especially shared experiences, I think average home users would be better off with some cool 3D glasses, which seems to be sony's approach.
Right?
expandfairuse.org
I'm rooting for Oculus Rift. VR headsets are much more immersive, inexpensive, and doesn't require you to set aside a separate room for it.
You assume that your teleporter will allow you to accurately target someone from very far away....and that you will be able to do this quickly enough to fend off an entire strike team (and that you will have some way of knowing and tracking the movements of every member of said strike team at once). Same for bombs and such that may be sent your way. You also assume that you will have an independent power source...so nobody can just cut you off.
I find your assumptions dubious.
Now the BSOD experience can be immersive!
It was for some show where they tried to cook up a "dream rig" of absolute cutting edge and they had a bunch of Hollywood SFX guys helping out. The thing used some sort of belt system that was able to switch direction, don't ask me to explain the thing but I can tell you they did have a small harness to keep him from going too far on the system and taking a header. They had rigged up this lightgun M16 that would work in game and track his fire so he could just blast, along with a set of infrared lasers that allowed him to duck and lean.
It was wicked cool to watch but afterwards the guy using it said he felt like he was gonna have a coronary when bad guys came flying out from around a corner and that the tracking did leave him with a sick at his stomach feeling so while it might be cool in small doses i kinda doubt its something you'd want to have a marathon CoD session with. Still looked cool as hell to watch.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So -- they're suggesting running a game in a CAVE virtual environment? Not exactly new. Multiscreen flight sims [xplane] are examples of one form of prior art (ok -- not quite CAVEs, but I don't know of a game in a CAVE environment. To argue that doing so is somehow non-obvious would be ridiculous. But I guess that's what lawyers are paid to do.
I'm not so sure. I can't speak for OP but I don't imagine I'm the only one around here who has softened their stance with Microsoft over the years. I went from hater to neutral and was genuinely impressed by the Kinect. I have high hopes for this one after the Kinect went pretty well. (aside from my room being too small to play without crashing into things...a lot. :P )
If it's a patent issue, btw, I guess I'm not bothered much by large scale, high risk, research heavy patents. I'm more bothered by the stuff I could code in less than a typical work day. (which is probably >95% of software patents floating around)
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Think about making a 'treadmill' that allows 360 degree movement. You are ether standing inside a ball or on top of one.
There is one system (Russian) that does put you in a giant transparent sphere. (Saw this at Nextfest)
However, there are some other systems for doing this that work pretty well...
One is a treadmill, actually two, set at right angles, one sort of "riding on" the other (don't know the exact mechanism, just saw the video) As you walk, say north, the N-S treadmill runs south. If you turn west, the E-W treadmill starts moving you east. If you move on a diagonal they both run in opposition to your movement to keep you near the center.
There is a cute one with motorized roller skates that slowly roll you back to center.
There is also an interesting psychological approach to this problem. One system actually keeps changing the map layout so you gradually keep yourself centered. This works well with a map with a lot of turns, of course. It works by making your turns "not quite" or "a little more than" 90 degrees; and then changing the layout behind you. As I recall, most people were unaware of the changes.
That said, I own an old VR helmet. You're going to want to sit and have solidly mounted controls in your hands. Less pukey that way.
I've been using an HMD for about 8 years. The 'pukey' years were back when I couldn't refresh the display fast enough to keep the display up with head tracking. So, my inner-ear and visual cortex had to fight it out. Now I'm getting a good FPS, no more puke. I run freestanding with a hand controller. If you think about it, you walk though real-life without nausea. If the head tracking and refresh are solid, it just looks like RL.
i've seen the treadmill and the ball version, but to me they both have the same problem, you're always on a flat surface. So what happens when you reach a set of steps or a hill in a game, you have to walk through it but magically float up as you do it. My solution would be an iron man suit suspended in the air then you just match the suits limits with the terrain. Want to lean against a wall, as you get close to the virtual wall all the servos in the suit lock up and you can't move in that direction any more. it should also take up much less space than the treadmill, or even the ball.
I think you saw that in a dream.
Think about making a 'treadmill' that allows 360 degree movement. You are ether standing inside a ball or on top of one.
Yeah, an omnidirectional treadmill would be totally impossible in any other way...
Omnidirectional treadmill
CyberWalk
A professor of mine was doing this back in 2004, I wonder if that counts as prior art, or he could have been working with microsoft I guess.
It only counts as prior art if anybody bothers to mention it to the patent office. I think their "examination" process boils down to flipping a coin until they get "heads" 100 times in a row, then stamping "approved" on the application. And that could take some time, so plenty of shitty beer is drank and a lot of cheap pizza is eaten during this process.
And I don't mind waiting a hellofa lot longer for Sony to do it better...
Standing/walking on top of a large tray of 'ball bearings' would work and recording their rotation to work out your movement.
MS hasn't been granted this patent, hasn't been reviewed by examiner, and is just a published application.
Geez... doesn't Gene Roddenberry own that Patent for the HoloDeck on the Enterprise???
... until the top treadmill hits the end of the lower one, and falls off.
There's no way it could work how you describe.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm sorry I failed to describe it to your satisfaction. You did read my disclaimer?:
"One is a treadmill, actually two, set at right angles, one sort of "riding on" the other (don't know the exact mechanism, just saw the video)"
Please watch these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=moq1Dclza90
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rtX2pWRh6w