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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."
Microsoft sure knows how to tease us with new technology. More baby, more!
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!
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.
AMERICA) might be fa3t there won't For all practical Let's keep to move forward, ME! It's official
Isn't having thought about it supposed to be enough prior art?
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/
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.
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!
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.
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...
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???